


Acquisitions

by VeritySilvers



Category: XCOM (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Competent People Being Competent, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-07-28 15:49:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 137,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16244855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeritySilvers/pseuds/VeritySilvers
Summary: Not all heroes are young and perfect.  Bradford is old and bitter, but he's going to try to save the world anyway.  He just needs to acquire a few things along the way - and Jane Kelly, for purely professional reasons, happens to be his first step toward resurrecting XCOM.Or, how Bradford keeps XCOM alive long enough to make a difference, and what he manages to gain on the slow road toward victory.





	1. 01-01: Acquiring Kelly

# Acquisitions

## Section 1: Winning the Ground

### Chapter 1: Acquiring Kelly

Until Vahlen’s message comes through, Bradford had been planning on spending Unification Day holed up in his awful excuse for an apartment with two bottles of whiskey and a dart board covered in the outlines of aliens.

He used to spend Unification Day out in public. He’d find some hole-in-the-wall bar, the kind of place with rough regulars and strong liquor. He’d nurse a glass of whiskey or two and wait for the inevitable bar fight: someone would say something about the aliens, someone else would be offended, and tables would be overturned. He’d join in the brawl on the side of whoever was insulting the Elders; there’d be punches, some broken noses, maybe the occasional idiot waving a broken bottle around like he was some action hero. Bradford could join in to crack a few heads and vent a year’s worth of frustration on drunkards. Because he’d always chosen his bars carefully, there’d never been any kind of peacekeeper presence to put an end to the fun before his knuckles were sore and bruised. It didn’t do much to appease his anger — the bar fights were short and violent and never really changed anything. But it had been almost soothing, in a way, to know that tempers still ran hot and drunkards were still willing to stand at his side in an attempt to beat reason into alien supporters, even if no one dared to do so anywhere but in the worst dive bars.

Nowadays, though, those kind of bars are hard to find. Less people complain about the aliens these days, and most bars have some kind of security camera mounted over the doors. He’s not sure which came first, but it’s a combination that he doesn’t like. All it means is he doesn’t go out to get into brawls on Unification Day anymore. Instead, for the past couple of years he’s celebrated Unification Day by himself. He usually buys a good bottle of whiskey – Unification Day is at least excellent incentive for liquor to go on sale – and spends the day systematically decreasing his aim with alcohol while repetitively throwing darts at various alien silhouettes pinned to his wall.

Vahlen’s message will prevent that this year, and Bradford is annoyed at the break in tradition. He’s not annoyed enough to do anything about it – getting set up for the mission is clearly more important than his self-imposed Unification Day habits. But he is frustrated enough to roll his eyes and huff out a breath when he sends Vahlen back a coded message agreeing that he’ll meet her contact as requested. 

It’s been nine years since he’s seen the scientist and two since he’s actually heard her voice, but he can practically hear the chiding in it when he reads her confirmation message. 

_Good,_ the brief snippet of text says. _I think you could use some company when you drink this year. Drinking alone is rarely conducive to your health, and can often be a sign of alcoholism or other mental health issues._

It’s short, very nearly offensive, completely innocuous should it fall into the wrong hands, and so completely Vahlen that Bradford’s lips curve into a smirk despite his annoyance. He misses Vahlen, more than he ever expected he would. They hadn’t been all that close back when they’d worked together, but even then he’d valued her blunt honesty and careful observations. She’d been competent and devoted, and betrayal and defeat and going underground hasn’t changed any of that. Vahlen remains exactly who she was before disaster and the end of the world, and Bradford values that. She’s one of the few who remembers what it was like before, and she is just as angry about what was lost as Bradford is.

Shen remembers too, of course, but he’s not angry. Bradford’s never seen the older man angry, not once. Regretful, certainly; concerned, definitely; annoyed, occasionally. But Shen is serene in a way that is at once inspiring and frustrating. His calm adaptation to this new world and their new situation borders too close to acceptance for Bradford’s taste. It isn’t, of course – Shen is just as devoted to the cause as he ever was – but he wears a mask of resignation in a way Bradford can’t quite understand. Shen simply shoulders the burdens of their new conditions and soldiers on regardless. Work still needs to be done, and anger will do nothing to solve it, so Shen puts aside whatever ire he has to better devote himself to what needs to be done.

Bradford, on the other hand, is angry. 

He hates everything about this new world, from the enforced sterility of the city streets to the alien-obsessed culture, from the denied freedoms of humanity to the fact that he’s still alive to deal with it. When he reaches the bottom of bottles, he wonders if he could have done something differently to prevent this ADVENT-controlled world – if he could have reacted faster, if he could have arranged some kind of defense that could have kept everything from falling apart, if he should have fought to the last breath instead of setting aside his gun to organize a frantic retreat. Sometimes, drunk and morose and defeated, he thinks he’d have been better off if he’d just died when XCOM did.

Which is why, he supposes, Vahlen doesn’t want him drinking alone.

He understands her concern, and even appreciates it, in a way. He doesn’t have many friends left these days, much less friends who aren’t intimidated by who he used to be and what he currently represents. To most people, he’s defined by his call-sign. He’s Central more than he is anything else these days: he’d been the officer at the helm of XCOM and the Commander’s right hand, and now he’s in charge of the paltry resistance sprung from XCOM’s ashes. It’s a burden and a requirement, being Central, but he’s unwilling — almost unable — to give it up, even if it means no one else these days really knows who he is behind his call-sign. Too few people remain who remember his name is John Bradford, and of them, Vahlen is the only one who dares to call him out on his self-imposed stupidity.

So he won’t be drinking alone on the fifteenth anniversary of Unification Day, and if all goes to plan, he won’t be getting into any bar brawls, either. It’s disappointing, if he’s honest with himself, and he’s already wondering when he can next find the excuse to hit something. He has few outlets these days, and he needs to stay in fighting shape; bar fights are hardly a training ground for actual combat, but they’re not bad as far as taking the edge off of his temper goes.

He’s supposed to meet Vahlen’s contact at a bar. He’s complained enough times about lack of suitable personnel that Vahlen finally agreed to send out another agent for him to put to work – an Irishwoman, according to the typically concise information Vahlen had provided – and he’s been told to meet her unobtrusively, buy her a drink or two, and determine if he thinks she’s legitimate. If she passes muster and Bradford thinks she’s trustworthy, he’s supposed to make arrangements for a second meeting a little further out from the city center where they might be able to have a conversation that isn’t in code.

Bradford hates undercover work.

He’s picked a neutral enough spot for the first meet-up. It’s a fairly average bar, just south of the city center. It’s new enough that no one is a regular yet, and popular enough that people from half-a-dozen walks of life are investigating it. No one will think twice about two people meeting there for drinks to celebrate Unification Day. 

Bradford’s uncomfortable, as he always is when he’s operating undercover. He doesn’t like moving through city centers unarmed, but carrying concealed weaponry is asking for trouble – the random scans are increasing these days, and being hauled off for setting off alarms is not a part of the plan. So he’s on edge as he waits outside the bar’s entrance, his hands in his jacket pockets more often than not and his shoulders hunched against the faint cold drizzle of evening rain. 

He watches the other bar patrons come and go, attempting to look like he’s not really paying attention to them as he gives every woman a quick glance, trying to guess which of them is Vahlen’s agent. He’s a fairly intimidating man, and making himself unobtrusive isn’t a skill that’s come easily to him. He has a pack of cigarettes he keeps for this sole purpose in his jacket pocket, and so he moves to the designated smoking area a few feet down the wall from the door. He stands with his back to the wall, trying to look bored, and pulls a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. No one really notices the smokers, not in this kind of neighborhood; it’s the best camouflage he can manage. He lights up and does his best to smoke as slowly as possible. Cigarettes aren’t tobacco these days, not anymore – he forgets the compound ADVENT uses as an additive now, the one that’s being touted as somehow beneficial rather than harmful. He hadn’t liked smoking before, back when all cigarettes did was spread cancer; he sure as hell doesn’t like it any better now that the aliens mix their own chemicals and God knows what else into it.

Still, he tends to hide in the poorer quarters of the cities, in the ghettos and still-dirty sections of town where ADVENT hasn’t had the time to polish everything up yet, where surly men like him aren’t questioned for merely existing. Learning to put up with the faintly metallic smell of the new cigarettes is just one more thing he’s done to survive on the fringes of ADVENT’s new world. He won’t be happy if alien cigarettes give him cancer, but he figures the aliens will find a faster way to kill him long before that becomes an issue.

He’s almost done with his second cigarette when a woman meandering towards the door of the bar in the wake of a group of obviously tipsy college students catches his eye. Her steps slow when she sees him, and she pauses before she turns her feet away from the door to head towards the smoking area. She’s garnered Bradford’s complete attention, though he does his best to not look like he’s watching her. She fumbles with a cigarette pack of her own before she approaches him, and only then does he look directly at her.

“Hey,” she says as she steps up next to him. “Got a light?”

She holds out a reddish cigarette with slender nicked fingers, her eyes dark and questioning. He lights her cigarette for her without saying a word, and she takes a slow drag from it on a deep breath. He knows enough about the damn things to recognize that she’s smoking Tills, which are only sold in Europe, and so he’s not entirely surprised when she exhales a stream of silvery smoke and says, “My doctor always tells me these things will kill me.”

He gives the countersign almost immediately, eager to be done with the required paranoia of determining trustworthiness before getting down to business. “That’s old advice,” he tells her, lifting his own cigarette. “My doctor says they’re fine.”

Something in the set of her shoulders changes – he can’t say that they stiffen or relax, but there’s a definite change. She holds herself a little differently, and she finishes the code with a neutral expression on her face. “Well,” she says, and the tip of her cigarette flares red in the darkness as she inhales again. “I suppose I should change doctors.”

They stand in silence after that, both finishing up their cigarettes. Bradford takes the opportunity to measure her with a glance. 

She’s younger than he expected – mid-thirties, he guesses. That makes her awfully young for someone who has supposedly been operating in the shadows since the invasion started, a background Vahlen had pointed out to him only because it would make her more useful to his cause. He’s suspicious by nature, and the discrepancy annoys him, niggling against the part of his brain that’s been trained to notice something unusual in case it is a threat.

Bradford’s cigarette shivers in his fingers as it reaches the filter, and he takes it from his mouth automatically as the quaking intensifies. The cigarette butt crumbles into ash – one of those helpful little new technologies the aliens insist on; ADVENT doesn’t trust the populace not to litter their clean new world with cigarette butts. Bradford brushes the ash from his fingers, and leans his shoulders against the wall as he waits for her to finish her own cigarette. He crosses his arms, and openly assesses her. He doesn’t have to be covert about it, now that she’s standing beside him, and she makes no effort to hide from his perusal. 

She’s not a large person, and he looks her over carefully, searching out weaknesses and threats with the wariness of an old soldier. Five foot four, he guesses; maybe a hundred and ten pounds, with the lean look of someone who could stand to eat a bit more regularly. He knows that look, and it’s a point in her favor. People ADVENT approves of don’t go hungry these days, and people they aren’t overly fond of tend to go short of food by choice or circumstance more often than not. 

She’s wearing well-worn clothes that aren’t really worth a second glance. Her grey pants and green shirt are both basic and plain, and the jacket she wears is dusty black leather, one of the vaguely military styles that he remembers being fairly popular a few years earlier. She’s got average written all over her: dark brown hair of middling length, dark brown eyes, fair skin with a slight tan that speaks to being outdoors more than inside, and a sprinkling of dark freckles across her cheekbones. She’s just pretty enough to be attractive and just plain enough to be forgettable.

She doesn’t shift under his gaze – there’s no nervous tick, no discomfort at being observed, which is a second point in her favor – so Bradford takes his time studying her. She smokes sedately the whole time, and he catalogs what he sees as her cigarette burns lower a breath at a time. The soldier in him can respect that she keeps her hair pulled back out of her face, and that the boots she wears are tough and designed for use rather than style. He recognizes self-control in how she holds herself still, poise in how she stands ready to fight or flee. He sees that there are fading bruises on the knuckles of her right hand, and he considers that a good sign even if he wonders about her capabilities in a fight.

When he lifts his eyes back to hers, she meets his gaze evenly, waiting. Her face is tranquil, and Bradford recognizes that calmness as a mask pulled over her real thoughts. A good skill, he thinks, for someone who has been operating against ADVENT, but an annoying talent when he’s trying to get a solid read on her to decide if she’s a double agent or not. But Bradford has years of experience on his side, and knows his own strengths. He lets his gaze darken into something like a glare, and raises an eyebrow at her skeptically. 

She doesn’t flinch at the scrutiny. He watches her eyes, though, and her eyes flicker across his shoulders, down to his hands, and back up to his face: a quick measuring glance, he thinks, to guess if he’s armed and to estimate his capabilities. He’s frightened her, just for a moment, and that was the point: he can just barely see through her very careful veneer of casual interest now. There’s nerves there, hidden beneath the outward calm; there’s curiosity and annoyance and the wariness that comes from being hunted for too long. 

Bradford’s lips twist as he recognizes that look; it’s all too familiar to him these days. As if in response, her own lips turn down into a faint frown. A second later, she blinks. Her casual mask intensifies, wiping away all traces of fear. Those doubts he’d seen vanish: calmness settles back into place across her features, and she is average once more, looking politely back at him as her slowly finishes off her cigarette.

But that little crack in her facade was all he needed. Bradford isn’t worried about his ability to silence her, if it comes to it: she’d approached him with a rolling gait and she looks like she can handle herself well enough, but he’s got the advantage if it comes to a fight and that brief flicker of fear in her eyes shows that they both know it. He’s nine or ten inches taller than her, and probably eighty pounds heavier: he’ll have longer reach and hit harder, even if she could match him in hand-to-hand combat otherwise. He has years of experience and the expertise to go with it; if anything goes wrong, he could have this woman on the ground and silenced in seconds. He’d break her neck, he thinks, looking at the pale skin of her throat where it emerges from the collar of her jacket. If she turns on him, if she’s a double-agent, if she’s not who Vahlen says she is, Bradford can remove her as a threat to XCOM quickly and quietly.

Still, seeing that flicker of nerves at play beneath her calm mask and watching her stand her ground despite it, Bradford decides she’s no ADVENT plant, even if she’s young enough that he doubts her history is wholly honest. He is confident in Vahlen’s ability to spot a traitor, and if Vahlen trusts her enough to send her this far, then she’s passed whatever tests the doctor has come up with to keep herself safe. He hasn’t seen Vahlen in nearly ten years, but he still has faith in her. Some things, he thinks cynically, prove loyalty to the cause the way nothing else can, and Vahlen has more than proved herself a hundred times over.

So, after a long moment of studying her in silence as she finishes her cigarette, Bradford decides to trust her. He extends his right hand as her cigarette disintegrates in her fingers. “Central,” he says by way of introduction. “The doctor sent you?”

She eyes him skeptically for a moment longer with wary brown eyes – turnabout, he thinks in amusement, is fair play. He wonders what she makes of him. He knows what he looks like these days: he’s leaner than he was fifteen years ago, older and sharper. He’s wearing civilian clothes, with the annoyance of a man still more comfortable in uniform even though it’s been a decade and a half since he’s worn one regularly. His hair is shorn short, and as much grey as brown these days. He’s a tall man, and age hasn’t diminished the breadth of his shoulders or the rangy strength of his frame: between his size and the deeply carved scar on his cheek, he’s an intimidating figure and he knows it. 

She considers him for the span of a dozen heartbeats as she brushes the ashen remnants of her cigarette from her fingers, and then takes his hand for a brief shake without flinching. “Jane Kelly,” she says, introducing herself. “She said she thought we’d get along.”

Her hand is thin and cold in the evening air, but there is a line of calluses in a strip along the top of her palm and her grip is respectable enough. There’s the barest hint of an accent in her voice, something a little more lyrical and European than the blunt American English he’s used to hearing. Bradford nods at her. “She’s usually right about these things,” he agrees. And, because he can follow orders even if he thinks their cover is stupid, he adds with an annoyed sigh, “Let me buy you a drink.”

The bar is crowded. They place their drink orders, wait in a crush of people for the bartender to fix them, and stand more or less crammed against the wall as they drink them. The place is filled with a cross-section of the city’s population, all out to celebrate the ADVENT-approved holiday. There are university students clearly feeling daring at trying out a bar on the fringes of the bad neighborhoods at the edge of the city centers, young professionals with over-bright eyes and less concern for their safety, older men and women with calculating eyes and assured self-worth, and a few rougher-looking men and women from the less polished neighborhoods nearby hunkered down in little drunken clusters. Bradford eyes them all with some level of distaste. He’s old now, he supposes: old enough to be annoyed with the loud laughter and blatant attempts at flirtation and the way that no one really seems to care that the world isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. They might care, he thinks bitterly, if ADVENT was dumb enough to restrict liquor the way it restricts liberties. In any case, the place annoys him, and he doesn’t fit in here: he’s too old and too blue-collar to belong with a crowd of twenty- and thirty-something bar-goers as they seek to cut loose on the weekend.

Kelly, at his side, would fit in better. The only thing that sets her apart from the rest of the crowd, he thinks, is that she’s standing with him and not with someone else more suited to the establishment. She’d been accosted twice on their way to the bar, which is why she’s standing very obviously at his side instead of at a safer distance; men with weaving steps seem to drift towards her every ten minutes or so, and Bradford’s gotten used to giving them a good glare to head them off. But she’s eying the scene with nearly the same distaste as he is, and she’s clearly just as unimpressed with the drink in her hand if her uncensored wince at her first sip was any indication. 

Her responses to his few questions are brief, distracted and concise and hard to hear over the noise of dozens of other voices. But she’s returning all the right countersigns, and she’s gamely playing into the own cover she’s been assigned by smiling up at him and continuing to sip what is likely an awful drink, doing her best to keep up her end of their meeting. She uses the correct codes to tell him that her trip from Europe was uneventful and that she’s got a safehouse somewhere in the city; her history matches up enough with what Vahlen told him to expect that Bradford’s few remaining worries are soothed.

He’s attempting to organize a second meeting with her, one where they can get down to actual business, when music suddenly blares into life, throbbing and electronic and horrifically loud. Bradford glares at another drunken thirty-something man veering towards Kelly; the man clearly decides she’s not interesting enough to fight over and just as quickly veers away. Kelly’s sigh of annoyance – over what, he’s not entirely sure; there are too many options to narrow it down to just one – is just barely audible, more obvious in the tightness of her shoulders and the disdain on her face than anything else. Because he agrees wholeheartedly with her sentiments, and because he dislikes this whole mess anyway, Bradford decides the hell with caution.

He sets his glass down on the table beside him, takes Kelly’s glass from her hand, and grips her elbow. “My place isn’t too far from here,” he tells her, practically shouting to be heard over the music. “It’s a lot quieter, and I can promise some decent whiskey.”

This is definitely off-script. He’s supposed to meet her in a public place, feel her out, dangle a few hints, and see if she’s willing to play along and come back for more later, after he’s had a chance to research her and do some follow-up digging on her. But Bradford’s annoyed, and he trusts Vahlen: if Kelly is Vahlen’s, then he can trust her too.

Kelly, for her part, doesn’t seem offended at the hand on her elbow or at the offered suggestion, though she surely knows he’s not supposed to initiate a private meeting between them just yet. It’s a stop-gap measure designed with her safety in mind as much as his: the cautious public meetings are supposed to allow each of them time to assess each other. But instead of refusing his unplanned suggestion, she just nods. In fact, she’s a better actress than he’d given her credit for: “Sounds good to me,” she all but drawls out with a smile, voice overloud so he can hear her despite the music, and she tucks herself up next to him as though she’s following him home from a bar for far more traditional reasons and not because they’d like to plan insurrection against the alien overlords in control of their planet.

So he slings his arm over her shoulders, and they weave their way out of the crowded bar and into the less-crowded street. It’s a relief to leave the hot stuffy air of the bar for the cooler fresh air of the rainy evening, and Bradford is quick to put distance between them and the bar. She has to lengthen her stride to keep up with him; Bradford only notices a block away from the bar, and slows to better accommodate her.

They’re quiet the whole way to his apartment. It doesn’t take them long to walk there — perhaps ten minutes — and his place, when they reach it, isn’t much to write home about. He’s got a blocky studio apartment in a squat brick building, part of one of the first housing projects ADVENT had sponsored over a decade ago. It’s hardly luxurious, or even really middle-class. It’s a working-class building on its better days, and the home of the unemployed and angry on its worse days. But then Bradford does his best to be unremarkable, and his apartment fits his cover. The building is filled with people like him: people who had been young and active when the old world had died: people who hadn’t quite been able to make the transition easily into the newer, prettier world of ADVENT. 

Kelly doesn’t say anything about the graffiti on the walls, the stench of cigarette smoke, the stains on the hallway carpet, the harsh voices projecting through thin walls, the dying trees that even ADVENT’s efforts can’t keep alive in this ignored and blighted part of town. If anything, she relaxes her shoulders under his arm, and he feels some tension leech out of her: she finds this familiar, and that as much as anything else is the final tip of the balance in favor of trusting her.

Bradford unlocks his apartment and ushers her inside, turning on lights and locking the door behind him. “We can talk safely enough here,” he tells her immediately. “There’s a sound-dampening module installed in the wall unit, and a scrambler running.”

“Okay,” she says. She stands across from him in the main living area, keeping enough of a distance between them to allow for some freedom of movement if he suddenly turns on her. After a brief survey of the room to take it all in — empty, impersonal, worn — she glances back at him. “So. Doctor said you’ve got something big planned. I’m in.”

Bradford snorts, unimpressed with her bravado. “Just like that? You’re either careless or crazy.”

Her smile, when it appears, is thin and tight. Something glints in her eyes, turning them suddenly as bright and sharp as obsidian. “I can’t go home again, Central,” Kelly says back, and there’s something brittle in her voice. “It’s surprising how much of a difference that makes.”

He wants to study her again, to peer at her and pry more into that statement to find out why she’s so reckless, so unquestionably devoted to the cause. But he’s already decided to trust her; there’s no reason to dissect her motivations.

Instead, he waits a moment until he’s sure he has her full attention. Then, putting all his cards on the table, he says, “There’s an abandoned alien supply craft crashed fifty-two miles outside of what used to be Nogales, Mexico.”

Because he’s watching her so closely, he can see her eyes flicker with interest. Still, she doesn’t betray any sign of excitement in her voice. “Really?” she asks coolly, inviting him to tell her more.

“We shot it down in the last days of XCOM,” he tells her, pride and regret mingling to make his words defiant. He deliberately steps away from the locked door, and watches her eyes notice the escape route he’s tacitly offering her. “I guess in all the chaos of the takeover, the aliens never thought to follow up on the wreck. I figure that makes it ours.”

“A supply ship?” Kelly asks, and now she does sound intrigued. She looks away from him for the first time, trusting him enough that he won’t take advantage of that lapse in the confined space, and crosses her arms. Thin fingers tap against her jacket sleeve as she speculates. “It’s been fifteen years – you really think you’re going to find something useful out there?”

Bradford shrugs, even as he crosses his arms, mirroring her stance. “Well,” he says, “I figured having a ship of our own would be useful enough.” 

Her bruised fingers pause on the leather of her jacket. She tilts her head, and her dark eyes swing back to him. She studies him for a long, tense moment. Then she lefts out a soft huff of breath — a sort of broken, silent laugh — and offers Bradford a slow, sly smile. He finds himself returning the expression, fierce and satisfied. 

“Doctor was right,” Kelly says. “I’m in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy October 9th! Since it's the anniversary of modern XCOM, I thought I'd get this up. (Also since the release of the Tactical Legacy Pack today will probably joss large portions of this otherwise mostly canon-compliant fic...)
> 
> This is my love letter to XCOM. It is a personal sort of head-canon which began with my first play-through and which ballooned bigger than expected. It is just about complete and in final editing; I plan to put up a chapter a day until it is all posted. I'm sure it's got flaws - and let's face it, my version of Jane Kelly is basically an OC with a familiar name and role slapped on her because she wasn't very developed in game. But I needed a foil for Bradford, and she fit that role best, and I like to think that I've made her interesting and competent in her own right. Anyway, aside from expanding Kelly's character, I've done my best to be canon-compliant (again, until today's TLP release, which I won't be attempting to fit in here), and I hope I've managed to tell a good story based on a game I quite enjoy.
> 
> This fic has made me really happy since I started work on it back in 2016 as a NaNoWriMo project. I'm not sure if it will appeal to anyone else as much as it resonated with me, but on the off chance it does, I decided to share it. 
> 
> Comments and questions are always welcome. I also have a fairly quiet tumblr (veritysays.tumblr.com) if you'd rather reach out there.
> 
> With great thanks to Jake Solomon and Firaxis for a very fun game, an interesting world, and a compelling story; to Tim Wynn, for an excellent soundtrack; to Brian Bloom, for making Bradford sound both defeated and defiant; to Beaglerush, for sucking me into XCOM back in 2015 via Live and Impossible; to Zee, for encouraging me to start and cheering me on to finish; and to my husband, as always.


	2. 01-02: Acquiring Esperanza

# Acquisitions

## Section 1: Winning the Ground

### Chapter 2: Acquiring Esperanza

XCOM hasn’t had a real base in fifteen years, since EXALT and the aliens had overrun their old headquarters. On his better days, Bradford can almost appreciate the irony of losing the headquarters they’d built deep into the earth: XCOM has gone from being literally underground to being figuratively underground. On his bad days, though, that fact only annoys him. Their first underground base had been secure and well-funded, professionally run and staffed by the best the world had to offer. Every person assigned to XCOM then had been exceptional, from the soldiers who went ground-side on missions to the support staff who never left the base. Headquarters had been filled with humanity’s most promising talent, scoured from across the globe, and everyone there had been honored and eager to serve.

Most of those dedicated and brilliant people are dead now.

XCOM is no longer the domain of the best and the brightest. There is no military installation built specifically for their use; there is no monthly operating budget. The recruits XCOM gains now are no longer decorated veterans from military branches around the world, handpicked for their abilities and potential. There is not a team of prize-winning scientists working in custom-built pristine labs; there are no engineers with impressive security clearances carefully learning to understand and integrate alien technology. 

Nowadays, XCOM is a broken and angry thing, and Bradford thinks it’s almost fitting that he’s the leader of this bitter version of humanity’s last hope, as broken and angry as he is. XCOM is his life, and has been since he was first assigned to it decades ago, when its future was still bright and hopeful. Now that future is broken and tarnished, but Bradford still can’t contemplate turning away from it. 

But that’s why he was chosen as XCOM’s Central Officer all those years ago. There had been other, probably more suitable candidates for the job: more senior officers with higher rank and better practical experience. But he’d fought for the assignment as soon as he knew he’d been optioned for it, putting his career on the line to push for his inclusion in the fledgling task group. In the end, it hadn’t been his considerable talents which had won him the assignment, though they’d opened the door for him. It had been his belief in XCOM itself that had earned him his spot as the new organization’s junior executive officer.

He still has that belief, as bitter and tattered as XCOM is now, and because of it, he can’t abandon even this desperate version of XCOM. 

They’re an underground movement these days: scattered, unfunded, and hunted. The recruits they gain now would never have been given a second glance during XCOM’s original musters, but Bradford doesn’t care because this isn’t the original XCOM. This is a newer, sharper, and more desperate XCOM, and so he takes anyone who can prove their loyalty to humanity rather than the Elders. 

It makes for a motley and unprofessional group. Most of XCOM’s recruits come burdened with tragedies, with mental triggers and deep-set hatreds and grief written plainly across their faces. Many join XCOM expecting to die, and many don’t care enough about themselves to care if they live through their assigned missions. Some join XCOM not out of hope but out of hate. Others arrive out of desperation, more yet because of fear. Still others arrive empty-handed and empty-eyed, with nothing remaining in them but the sense that they should make what little they have left count for something.

Very few recruits would pass the psychological and physical batteries that XCOM’s first soldiers and personnel had to endure before being declared fit for duty. Some days, Bradford isn’t so sure he’d pass those tests anymore himself, and so he does his best not think about it: instead he sends Shen damaged engineers with hard eyes, sends Vahlen maimed scientists with scars they won’t talk about, sends local resistance groups men and women with empty faces willing to hold a gun and put themselves between evacuating operatives and ADVENT troopers. 

It’s a new XCOM, as broken and desperate as the people within it, and it’s been Bradford’s life for the better part of the past decade and a half. It’s still his cause, as hopeless as it might seem, and so he’ll take anyone willing to help him fight for it.

There isn’t a base for Bradford to take new recruits to anymore. There’s no established boot camp, no formalized training, no informational briefings, no standardized uniform. Some days there isn’t even truly a cause beyond the desire to hurt the aliens; some days, there doesn’t need to be more than that. They’ve gone long, hopeless years without a victory, striking from the shadows to harry and harm but never truly making a difference.

All of that, Bradford thinks, is about to change.

Shen had been the one to notice the downed supply ship as a mass of metal and technology in the middle of an otherwise empty desert. Some of Vahlen’s people had managed to track back through the years to find the records indicating the crashed ship had never sent out a distress beacon. Bradford had led the scouting teams himself, and he’d been the one to confirm that the alien vessel was actually there: crashed, dark, dead, and most importantly, forgotten.

It’s changed everything. Over the past few months, XCOM has begun to gather together once more — the first time in almost a decade they’ve risked pulling people together into one central location. A small settlement has grown up a safe distance away from the downed supply ship, on the rim of the canyon where the ship has lain hidden for more than a dozen years. Shen had been the one to name the camp Esperanza: hope.

Bradford wants to complain about the triteness of the name, but he can’t. For the first time in years, it feels like he has a purpose again. It feels like it did back at the beginning, back when they had honestly thought they’d had a shot at repelling an alien invasion. People stride through the settlement with resolve in their steps and goals in their minds. Each task seems urgent, necessary, important. There’s the sense that they’re working towards something again at long last – something tangible, something valuable, something that will make a difference.

Still, for all that XCOM’s best are finally gathering together, it’s hardly an impressive group. There aren’t many of them, all told: twenty-five, perhaps, if he counts all the noncombatants. Bradford could press nearly all of them into combat service in an emergency, but it would be a disaster and they all know it. Supplies are limited, in any case: they don’t have enough guns or ammo to arm everyone, and effective body armor is a dim past memory from the brief glory days when XCOM actually had official funding and support. Bradford has only five people he considers combat-ready, in a worst-case scenario: himself, two veterans from the old days, and two unproven operatives ready to stand their ground with more devotion than skill.

Kelly brings that number up to six.

It’s a three-day trip from the city center where he met her out to Esperanza. None of the city centers have names anymore, and most of them aren’t actually located where human cities had once thrived. The aliens are trying hard to wipe away all traces of individuality and human history, and shifting population centers away from old settlements is a good way to do that. But Bradford’s always been good with geography, and he’s studied maps enough to have a good lay of the land: he met Kelly in what had probably once been the outskirts of Montreal. A day and a half on the new train system takes them south towards the city center that was once somewhere south of Phoenix — from there, it’s another day and a half of increasingly smaller vehicles and more anonymous drivers until they reach Esperanza.

They don’t talk much during the journey — in fact, until they reach what had been Arizona, they avoid each other, just in case ADVENT is watching. Bradford puts his back to the train wall and tries to sleep; Kelly acts the part of a young professional on her way to visit her father, and chats with each person who sits beside her. It’s the kind of undercover small talk Bradford can’t manage, casual and friendly and cheerful and entirely a lie on her part. His estimation of her rises as he listens to her over the thirty-eight hours they’re on the train. She never once breaks cover or contradicts herself by forgetting an earlier lie, and by the time they depart the train south of Phoenix, she’s learned at least three little bits of information that Bradford thinks can be put to good use by some of XCOM’s more connected operatives. 

Kelly’s willing to follow his lead as he gets them out of Phoenix and into the desert. They follow a long channel of sympathetic contacts who aren’t willing to actually fight the aliens but who don’t mind occasionally giving quiet strangers rides as long as no one asks any questions. They don’t talk much out of necessity, but even when conversation might be more acceptable, Bradford keeps his mouth shut and she does the same. The few words they share are more practical than friendly, so when they arrive at Esperanza, Bradford knows very little else about Kelly than he did when he first met her.

He shows her around the settlement with terse explanations and a slight sense of relief. Casper, the slowly thinning pot-bellied settlement manager, gives her a bunk in the tent Bradford shares with his combat team, and she is assigned kitchen duty and watch hours alongside the rest of them. She’s given twelve hours off, to sleep — neither of them have had much rest since leaving Montreal — and if the other inhabitants of Esperanza are surprised that Bradford is back from his assignment eight days early with a woman he wasn’t supposed to bring to them in person for another three weeks, no one comments on it.

On Kelly’s first full day in Esperanza, Bradford tells one of his veterans to put her through her paces just outside the chain-link fence of the settlement walls. He doesn’t bother watching; he’s been away for over a week, and there are more important things for him to deal with. But there’s a sense of urgency now that there wasn’t before; they’re close to a breakthrough, and so Bradford shuts himself into the little armory that is more or less his office these days and gets to work.

Still, he goes out to meet Marquez and Kelly at the end of the day as they come back through Esperanza’s flimsy gate. Marquez’s report is less than flattering: she’s abysmal with a rifle and only slightly better with a pistol. She’s a fair hand with explosives, though her experience obviously trends toward the improvised kind rather than the military grenades they’ve carefully hoarded. But Kelly’s got a decent arm and a good eye for thrown weapons, and Marquez is confident she can learn safe grenade protocol. The rest of his report is more direct. She’s fast, and mobile in a way that shows she’s used to being unencumbered, but she’s not used to working with a squad or in mounting direct assaults.

“Give her time,” Marquez says affably enough after his rundown. Kelly stands at his side obviously displeased to have been tested and found lacking. “I can work on her accuracy.”

Vahlen had sent her to be part of a combat team, and her lack of skill with firearms is annoying. “I thought Vahlen said you had combat experience,” Bradford accuses her.

She gives him a withering glare, lip curled derisively. “You don’t need guns for combat,” she says.

“No,” Bradford agrees, condescension all but dripping from his words, “but they help.”

She huffs out a breath, annoyed, and Bradford sighs. “Give her a shotgun if she’s that bad with the rifles,” he tells Marquez. And then, to Kelly, “Stay mid-range and aim for center mass; you’ll do all right with the scatter.”

She makes a little noise of agreement, and looks away – defiant or embarrassed, he’s not sure. Curiosity has him asking her, “What do you use instead of guns?”

Her voice is flat, matter-of-fact. “Whatever I can find.”

Bradford considers that, and then looks back at Marquez. “Get her some knives, too.”

That brings a smile to her face, a little satisfied one, but Bradford frowns as he watches Marquez lead her to the armory. Six combat-ready soldiers, he thinks with disgust, and three of them are unproven rookies who have barely any skill with modern firearms.

He misses the Commander when he considers their odds. The Commander had been a tactical genius, a man able to glance at an ugly situation and make the best of it with quick decisions and insightful orders. Bradford feels like he’s fumbling in the dark by comparison, sure that he’s missed something or made the wrong call. He’s not bad at tactics himself, at coordinating the logistics and supplies and people that make up XCOM. He’s always been good at thinking on his feet, at making the most out of bad situations, at leading a group of people towards what needs to be done. There’s a reason he advanced through the ranks quickly. He’d been a good squad leader, and he’d been a good executive officer once he’d been promoted away from fieldwork. He had more than earned his spot as XCOM’s Central Officer.

But there are reasons, too, that he was the junior officer beneath the Commander. He’d been assigned underneath the other man to support him, yes, but also to learn from him. The Commander had been brilliant, a charismatic leader and a canny tactician, and Bradford had considered himself lucky to work with the man. He’d been almost in awe of the Commander’s quick battlefield decisions, the easy way he could weigh options and send strike teams forward at what seemed to be the exact moment they’d be needed. Bradford had felt privileged to be chosen as his second, as support and apprentice, and the Commander had made it easy to learn from him.

The friendship they’d struck up on their off-hours had been a bonus: Bradford had respected the Commander professionally, of course, but more than that, he’d just plain liked the man. They’d gotten along well, on duty and off, and losing him had been all the harder for that.

The Commander, he thinks, could pull this off. He’d led XCOM so brilliantly in their few short months of operation that the aliens had put everything else on hold to destroy him. He’d shaped XCOM into such a threat in a bare handful of months that he had painted a target onto his back, and turned himself into a priority for the aliens. They’d poured the full power of their assault onto him — onto him, and against the XCOM he’d built to thwart them — and even the Commander hadn’t been able to fight his way out of betrayal from within and a coordinated surprise attack.

Now the Commander is gone, and Bradford leads XCOM in his place. A lesser general, he acknowledges, and worse odds: it’s foolish to think that they can wrest victory from the aliens in these conditions.

Still, they can’t help fighting back, even if success is all but unattainable. The crashed supply vessel is a good place to start. It gives them purpose, a tangible hope for the future that they can latch onto and work to make a reality.

The engineers are buzzing around old schematics and power plans, listening to every word Shen utters as though it’s sacred gospel. There’s close to a dozen of them, from Shen’s twenty-three-year-old daughter to the eighty-three-year-old nuclear physicist all but confined to his bed by arthritis. They spend their days in a converted barn stuffed full of gear, alien and otherwise. The walls are thick with power cords dangling from the generators mounted in the rafters, and the the already-warm air inside the barn is stifling and choked with the exhaust of computers, monitors, modules, and displays.

The three scientists are all Norwegian, a trio that came over just as Esperanza was started. They work on monitoring the fluctuating power draws still occasionally flickering to life deep within the crashed supply ship. They keep to themselves for days at a time, locked in the little wooden shack they’ve taken over as a lab, and when they emerge, blinking at the bright Mexican sun, they bring forth reports on the strength of hull segments and the potential range of transmitter devices. 

There are two supply teams, and they seem to be locked in competition with each other, tugging on their networks of contacts and dealers to bring as many provisions as possible into the settlement. Everything feels urgent, and supplies are gathered and hoarded as though there won’t be another chance to go after them. Guns slip in, one by one, with ammo and far too few grenades; rough body armor, patched and only slightly better than worthless; food to keep body and soul together and blankets to keep the desert night air at bay. There are medical supplies, computer parts, drone wrecks, news feeds, tents and lumber for semi-permanent structures. It’s a toss-up as to which supply team is winning their self-defined and convoluted competition: the one headed by a man Bradford is fairly sure used to be a Colombian drug lord produces an impressive power generator, but the one led by the wiry local Mexican grandmother produces an actual Chihuahua puppy.

It’s the first dog any of them can remember seeing in nearly eight years, since the purges started, and Shen’s daughter all but adopts it as their mascot. It’s a tiny thing, all trembling skin and nipping teeth. She names it Bruiser, and keeps it in the thigh pocket of her oversize coveralls. Bradford is almost certain that the dog eats better than they do; no one seems able to resist feeding it tidbits off of their plates, and the Chihuahua is nearly universally adored by all for the hope it represents.

For his part, Bradford works with his combat-ready operatives. He only has five of them, and he hesitates to call them soldiers because most of them have never seen any kind of military service. Marquez and Chou are his only two professionals, actual soldiers and survivors of the first failed XCOM. They are veterans of true combat against the aliens, steady and practiced and the core of his combat squad. He’s trusted his back to them before, and knows their strengths. 

The others are more nebulous. Two of them came from California with Shen and his daughter: Osei and Kenbridge. Osei carries himself with the posture of military training if not military experience; Bradford thinks he might have been a police officer somewhere back in Nigeria before everything went to hell. Kenbridge is from Chicago; he’s looser, rougher, wiry and wise-cracking, and he’s most familiar with pistols. A gang member, Bradford guesses, thinking of the chaos Chicago fell into fifteen years ago, and since it doesn’t make much of a difference these days, he doesn’t ask the man to confirm his guess. The last member of his combat team is Vahlen’s Kelly, fast and quick-thinking though not terribly experienced. She’s used to working alone, and it shows in how she struggles to work with the others. Still, Bradford thinks that with time he can turn her into a fairly useful scout if not an actual soldier.

Most of the time the teams are fairly separate. The engineers hide away in their barn, and the scientists huddle together in their smaller shack. The supply teams rotate in and out of the settlement, drifting away in the cool early-morning hours and sliding back in after dark some days later with arms and backs burdened with what they’ve acquired. Bradford’s combat squad trains together outside the chain-link fence, learning how to work as a team and how to communicate with military precision and abrupt hand signals. The veterans teach the newcomers how to handle their second-hand guns and third-hand armor, and the three non-military recruits do their best to absorb information they’d never needed to know before aliens conquered their world. Bradford takes them all down into the canyon once they’re used to working together, mapping out the terrain around the downed ship and learning the best sight lines and angles for the assault they know will come sooner or later.

But everyone meets for dinner, in the open-air tent where three long wooden tables are crammed together. There’s a man on the second supply team who’s a decent cook, even if he’s a little heavy on the spices used to try to desperately mask the flavor of packaged protein. He’s prompt, though, and good at stretching their limited supplies far enough that no one goes hungry, so just before sunset when the wind dies down, the whole settlement gathers together to share the evening meal.

Dinners tend to be fairly quick events, though there is a communal feel to them. People sit, greet each other, share whatever pertinent information needs to be made known to the group at large, eat quickly, and disappear back to their projects. There’s a sense of urgency in the settlement: no one wants to wait around. Things are moving, and there’s no time to sit still, not when for once they’re working towards something that feels so important.

Esperanza. It’s a dangerous name, but Bradford can’t deny Shen knew what he was doing when he decided what to call the settlement. It’s accurate. It’s infectious, too: he goes to bed without drinking, most nights, and as he and his team scout out the downed alien craft, he has to stop himself from ordering them to inch just a little closer. He nearly orders Chou to breach the main door before he reigns in his impatience, and only a day later he has to speak sharply to Kenbridge when the man ventures right up against the vessel’s hull.

“Is this what XCOM was like?” Kelly asks him about a month after her arrival. “The first XCOM, I mean, back from before. Was it like this?”

It’s late — dinner is over, the sun has set, and they’re taking advantage of not being on watch to sit and enjoy the calm of the evening. Chou and Kenbridge and two women from the supply teams are checking the perimeter; the scientists are sharing cups of hot tea by the tables, and the engineers are doing their best to rig up a screen to watch some comedy video. No one is working: evenings are designated for free time, and while it’s rare everyone takes it at once, this seems to be one of those unique days when an air of casual relief spreads across the settlement and everyone takes the chance to breathe a little. 

Still, the reality of their situation is never far away, and even in the cheerful recreational time there are signs of it: the blackout cloth Shen’s daughter carefully stretches around each window and door of the shed where the video will be shown, the lack of a campfire for the scientists, the way everyone keeps their voices low, how eyes stray towards the darkness surrounding the camp with cautious wariness.

Bradford is showing Kelly how to field strip his pistol to get her more familiar with it, a task they’ve been working on for a few nights running. She’s been based in Europe for her whole life, where guns are still much harder to come by outside of military channels, and so unlike the American recruits he’s more used to, she has no background with firearms. But she’s at least a fast learner; Bradford wants to get her up to speed as quickly as possible to make her less of a liability with a gun. They’re sitting in a pool of sharp white light from the single floodlight overhead, the only light the settlement risks after nightfall. Moths flit above them around the floodlight’s lamp.

The smell of gun oil is as close to comforting as anything can be these days, and the rasp of metal against metal as he pulls apart his pistol’s slide mechanism is familiar and almost soothing. “No,” he says shortly, handing her the pieces to be cleaned, and it’s true. In the original XCOM, he’d had an entire armory devoted to keeping weapons and armor pristine and perfect. Now he’s sitting on a milk crate, with the pieces of his pistol set carefully on a cloth across Kelly’s lap as she cleans each component.

“Oh.” Kelly’s lips twitch — disappointment or acceptance, he’s not sure. “I’ve never been part of something big like this before, with this many other people. I guess I supposed this is how it was back then.”

She has just the barest trace of an Irish accent, something just a little odd in the way she pronounces a few vowels. It makes her sound almost wistful, and younger than he thinks she is. 

Bradford glances at her, and then reconsiders. “Maybe a little,” he concedes, fingers stilling on the pieces of his gun. He looks out, away from the circle of harsh white light cast by the floodlight, past the darkened barn where the engineers are muffling their laughter, out towards the desert. If he steps away from the lights, he knows, he can see the stars overhead: this far from any city center, there’s no other light pollution to mask them. They’re not as comforting a sight as they were fifteen years ago.

“Same dedication, I guess,” he says after a moment’s thought. He looks away from the darkness beyond the settlement’s chain-link fence, and back down at the pieces of the pistol separated out on the cloth spread across Kelly’s knees. “But that’s about it.”

He hands her the pistol’s grip, and she takes it with careful fingers. Her skin is paler than his — her skin is probably naturally a shade or two lighter than his, and she’s seen less sunlight than him recently as well. Her hands are small and slender compared to his. The pistol, when assembled, doesn’t sit as comfortably in her smaller grip as it does in his, and she still carries it with the wary respect of someone new to firearms compared to the professional and almost automatic way Bradford can handle it.

But her hands are as callused as his are, and rough with use. Even if his calluses come from where his pistol slots easily into his grip and her calluses are in different places, a strip of tough skin at the top of her palm and on the pad of her forefinger, it’s reassuring to know that her hands have been put to practical use before. There are nicks and scrapes across her fingers, spread across the backs of her hands and scratched into her palms. Some of them are fresh, still red and scabbed over, but most are old: thin white scars, almost invisible against her pale skin.

He’s known her for about a month, and still knows very little about her. Most of what he’s learned of her has come from their time in the canyon and out on the practice ground. She’s swift on her feet and she has keen eyes; she’s observant enough to be assigned point more often than not; she’s quiet and more cautious than reckless. She’s decent with firearms, though it’s more luck and natural talent than experience — Marquez was right, and she’ll improve rapidly once she she gains more time to practice, but at the moment she’s just shy of being a liability with the shotgun she’s been assigned.

Bradford doesn’t know anything of substance about her, though. He doesn’t know why she’s here, beyond the fact that Vahlen sent her. He doesn’t know her background: what she was before the invasion, what she’s done since, what has made her so willing to risk her life on such an admittedly dangerous venture.

But there are scars on her hands, and those go a long way toward reassuring him. Whatever she was before, she’s clearly willing to adapt to changing circumstances and learn to make the best of her new situation. Her fingers are steady as she fits the pistol pieces together: Kelly has a sharp mind and a good memory, and she assembles the gun with precise and careful motions, exactly as he’s taught her. And when she hands him back his pistol, reassembled perfectly, her dark eyes are clear and unafraid.

More than anything else, he thinks, that is a look he remembers from the early days of XCOM. He hasn’t seen it much lately. Marquez and Chou remember too much; Kenbridge has too much bravado, Osei too much fear. Shen always looks weary; the engineers still look hunted, a remnant of the harrowing journey they’d suffered on their way to Esperanza; the scientists are fairly consistently troubled.

But Kelly is a breath of calm. She carries herself with a kind of unobtrusive self-assurance that indicates she knows her own strengths and weaknesses well, and Bradford hadn’t realized how much he’d needed to see that level of confidence in another’s face until he looks at her. He takes the pistol as she offers it to him, and her hands linger on the gunmetal, long enough to make him look up at her as she hands it off to him.

When he meets her eyes, she takes a deliberate breath. “What do you think of our chances?” she asks him quietly as she lifts her hand from the pistol.

She doesn’t need to explain what she’s referring to; the canyon and the crashed supply ship lie six miles north of them.

Bradford stands. The milk crate tips behind him, settling down into the dust; he ignores it. Instead, he turns to face the north, and considers. He could lie to her, of course. He’s been a leader long enough to know that sometimes it’s best for all involved to just utter some comforting lie, some reassuring sop to raise morale and keep fear and speculation at bay. But he’s a solider at heart, blunt and honest, and he’s too bitter about what the world has become to sugar-coat his words these days. He’s the type of man who prefers to face the truth, no matter how ugly.

He considers their odds — one in a hundred, one in a thousand, one in five thousand? “I don’t know,” he finally says, and he shoves his pistol back into his thigh holster more roughly than he intended. “Low. It’s a long shot.”

Kelly scuffs one booted foot in the dirt, and then stands. “Yeah,” she says, and meets his eyes evenly. “I thought so.” A very small smile curls at the corner of her mouth, and she gives him a little nod. “See you tomorrow, Central.” 

Her back is straight as she walks away, and there had been no fear in her eyes as she’d looked at him, only a measuring kind of consideration and a determination Bradford remembers all too well from fifteen years ago. 

It’s been a long while since Bradford has found someone he thinks would have done decently in the original version of XCOM. He considers it a good sign.


	3. 01-03: Acquiring Readiness

# Acquisitions

## Section 1: Winning the Ground

### Chapter 3: Acquiring Readiness

It takes four more months before Shen declares them ready: four months of drills, practice, study and speculation. 

If it had been up to Bradford, he’d have ordered the five members of his combat team down into the canyon weeks ago. As soon as he was sure they could work as a team — as soon as he could trust Kelly with a gun, as soon as Kenbridge stopped shooting first and thinking second, as soon as Osei learned to take orders without hesitation, as soon as Chou and Marquez learned to trust the new recruits — as soon as they were solid, Bradford would have led them down into the canyon and started the assault.

Bradford is not a patient man. He never was, but the past fifteen years have only heightened his impatience. He knows this, and Shen knows this, which is why the final call on when they will attempt to reclaim the ship rests in Shen’s more cautious hands. Bradford doesn’t like it, but is man enough to accept it with nothing more than a grimace. It’s best if everyone in Esperanza is prepared for the assault, from Shen’s engineers to the marketeers and the scientists and Bradford’s combat squad, and Shen is the best one to make that call. 

So Bradford works with his team and tries not to think about when Shen will decide the time to move has arrived. Because of that, when Shen does proclaim them ready, it’s unexpected.

“We’ve done all we can from here,” the older man says with finality one evening as dinner is wrapping up. He meets Bradford’s eyes with the confidence of a man with a clear conscience. “It is time.”

Silence falls abruptly across the three tables; the brief chatter that always erupts during their communal dinners dies away in the span of a heartbeat. Then, after that breath of stunned quiet, everyone seems to exhale at once. There’s a little murmur of muted excitement around the tables; Shen had not tried to modulate his voice to keep his declaration quiet, and everyone knows what his words mean. 

Bradford considers, and then rises to his feet. 

“When?” he asks, abandoning his mostly-finished dinner and moving to stand at the front of the tables. The eyes of everyone in Esperanza turn to him; the mantle of leadership settles across his shoulders, heavy and familiar with the weight of their lives. Food and plates are set aside, utensils dropped haphazardly onto the tables and the meal completely forgotten. This is no longer a dinner gathering, but a strategy session, and people sit straighter and listen attentively because of it. 

Shen shrugs, clasping his hands in front of him and resting them on the table. “I leave that to you,” he says, inclining his head. Light glints off his half-moon glasses and the pate of his bald head. “But the major details are in place, and we are as prepared as we can be for the strike. There is no reason to delay further.”

Bradford eyes the sky: the sun is setting, but they have several hours of summer daylight left. He turns to the blonde woman who seems to be the chosen spokesperson of the scientists. “Tomorrow?”

Her English is heavily accented and very precise. “If you would like,” Dr. Jensen says. “We have completed our current research and likely will have nothing further of use to add for some time.”

Bradford turns to the supply teams. The Colombian man beams, nodding, but the Mexican woman is frowning. “No, Señor,” she says, shaking her white-haired head. She holds up her fingers to show her point. “Two days. Tomorrow for prepare, day after for fight.”

Bradford nods, sees no dissent from elsewhere, and turns back to Shen. “Day after tomorrow,” he decides, and there’s a shiver of certainty that spreads through the groups. “Tomorrow we’ll need to ready everything to move. Esperanza won’t be secure until we take over the ship. I don’t want anyone or anything left here that we can’t do without in a worst-case scenario. We’ll need to evacuate all non-essential personnel and supplies back to our safehouses.”

Shen winces, and resignation cross his face even as he nods in complete agreement. Bradford knows his daughter will protest being left behind, but that’s not an argument she’s going to win with Shen even if Shen is clearly not looking forward to the debate. Some kind of sympathy for her situation keeps Bradford from looking down the tables at her as her father begins to speak. “I will need to take three engineers with me,” Shen says, and looks back to the tables. “Georgia, Thomas, and Rishi, if you are willing.”

The three so named all nod, without hesitation.

Shen continues. “We will make arrangements tomorrow to move most of the equipment out of Esperanza – Sean, if you would take charge of that.”

“We will also be ready to depart tomorrow,” Dr. Jensen says. She gestures at the tall blonde man beside her, who lifts his brows inquisitively. “Perhaps Johan shall stay behind?”

Bradford remembers that he was the one who gave Shen’s daughter stitches when she sliced her arm open on a drone’s power supply. A medical doctor wouldn’t be a bad idea. He nods, and turns to the supply teams. “We’ll need a minimal staff back here as support,” he says. “Johan will be our medic; we’ll need someone to man the comm station and someone else ready to drive a transport if we need a fast extraction.”

The Colombian man eyes his counterpart with a measuring gaze. There is a quick and heated conversation in Spanish shared between them, and it is Maria who turns back to respond to him. “Yes, Señor,” she says. “Someone will stay.”

Lastly, Bradford turns to the five members of his combat team. They sit together at the last table, a cluster of haphazard volunteers willing to fight and die for the cause. They sit straight in their chairs, attention fully on him. This is why they are here, and he knows that they don’t expect any orders other than the ones that will lead them into danger and possible death. “We’ll prep tomorrow,” he tells them. “We’ll do a full recon and plan the assault angles. Let’s do this right.”

There are nods of agreement and serious faces, and no one voices any dissent. So Bradford looks back across the tables, at the people who have turned Esperanza’s minor settlement into what might see XCOM fully reborn for the first time in fifteen years. He sees nerves and eagerness and mulish stubbornness – that one is Shen’s daughter, and he doesn’t envy Shen the argument he knows is coming there. But mostly, he sees determination and hope.

“All right, people,” he says. “Let’s get to work.”

And, just like that, months of planning comes down to the last forty-eight hours.

The last morning with everyone in Esperanza dawns clear and warm: summer is harsh in the desert, and the air heats quickly once the sun rises. The engineers and scientists are busy, dismantling computers and preparing for evacuation. The supply teams are swarming across the camp, packing some materials and dragging others off to be buried in the desert in optimistic anticipation of their return. They won’t risk leaving Esperanza intact: if the combat team fails to take the ship, Esperanza won’t be worth returning to, and failure looms large enough as a possibility that it would be irresponsible to not plan for it. So the noncombatants work to strip the camp, to take it apart in ways that will hopefully need to be reassembled in mere days.

Bradford’s team, though, has little extra to do. They have been preparing for this for months: running drills, discussing plans, and practicing breaches in the overly bright desert sun. The last day is, for them, very similar to every other day, which is exactly the way Bradford wants it. Habit and routine make for grounded soldiers. He wants to see no nerves and nothing unusual to cause them, only competency and calm.

He takes his team down into the shade of the canyon shortly after the noon meal. It’s a long hike from Esperanza, and the canyon walls are steep; his team travels in silence, familiar with the route and with each other after taking this trip together once every other day or so for the past few months.

The supply ship sits where it crashed fifteen years ago, wrecked at the base of the canyon wall where the canyon narrows into a thin passage. It completely closes the way ahead, a blocky artificial wall creating the end of a box canyon. It’s a large, unwieldy thing — “a brick with fins,” Chou had dubbed it months ago, and Bradford has to admit it doesn’t look aerodynamic. It’s blunt and ugly, in the same way a semi-truck is blocky and solid: this is a supply ship, designed to haul people and gear, and it’s built to be sturdy and useful rather than sleek and swift. It has no armaments or military value — this is the equivalent of a civilian cargo craft, as far as alien ships go, valued simply for its ability to haul heavy loads. The hull is strong and impressively thick, made to complement the electromagnetic shields that would have helped protect it while it was under its own power. 

But as ugly as it is, it’s in decent shape for a ship that was shot out of the sky fifteen years ago. There are scorch marks from direct hits scattered around the ship’s hull, and the nose of the thing clearly plowed through part of the canyon’s rim on its way down to the bottom. About a third of the outer hull is warped and dented from the impact of hitting the ground, but despite the damage, there’s no hole in the ship’s outer structure: the thick panels of shielding welded onto the thing did their job well. Because of that stroke of luck — because the hull wasn’t breached — the detritus of the past fifteen years hasn’t worked its way into the ship itself. 

The outside of the ship has begun to be reclaimed by the desert. A decade and a half of being forgotten has let time begun to leave its mark. There is sand swept across it, and the markings alongside the hull have had large parts of their alien script scoured away by the fine grit the desert winds carry constantly aloft. Hardy plants are growing in the shade of the thing, stubby and faded and small to better survive in the harsh environment. A few opportunistic birds have made their nests in the nooks and crannies of the outer hull. The canyon wall has partially collapsed over the forward side of the ship, the part that crashed the hardest into the ground; dirt and rocks have buried the nose of the thing, and fifteen years of rain and wind have covered the whole ship in an ever-thickening layer of gritty dust.

But the inside of the alien craft should be unaffected by time and weather and the slow-growing desert plants. The ship is as tightly sealed as it was when it first fell from the sky: nothing has managed to breach the hull and actually enter the ship in fifteen years.

Nothing has exited that ship in fifteen years either, which is more of a worry. They’ve done enough tests to know that the ship does still have some trickle of power left: there are generators or batteries still running somewhere deep within the supply ship’s interior. It’s not enough power to bring up the shielding around the hatches, but still, it doesn’t bode well. Even more worryingly, the scientists have reported their scans still bring up faint life signs from somewhere deep within the downed vessel.

The ship’s crew probably died on impact: the supply craft came to a stop more or less upright on the canyon floor, but for all their genetic modifications, most aliens are no more hardy than humans. No creature made of flesh and bone can survive a fall from the sky like the one this vessel took unless they were very carefully protected.

Not all aliens are flesh and bone, though — Bradford remembers the ones they’d called outsiders, aliens of crystal and angry orange energy, and wonders if there are quiescent floating crystals waiting to be called back to life by intruders. He hasn’t seen an outsider since the early days of the invasion, and he can’t remember ever finding one aboard a supply craft, but it’s better to take no chances. There could be a whole team of outsiders — three if it’s a small team, five if they’re extraordinarily unlucky and it’s a full squad — just waiting to come to life and ambush them.

Most likely, though, the life signs the scientists can barely pick up through the thick metal hull belong to other aliens. This was a supply craft: it could have been transporting nearly anything, but given the time frame of when XCOM had originally shot it down, it’s a safe bet that it had been transporting alien troops. Those soldiers were probably still alive, sealed into pressurized and automatic cryotanks: cooled, slowed, and carefully cushioned in their tanks even through the ship’s crash landing. They would remain in stasis until their tanks were activated, until the time came for them to be roused from their artificial hibernation and they could continue the invasion of Earth.

If they do everything right, Bradford figures they can secure the ship without activating the cryotanks. But nothing much has gone right in the last few years, so he’s drilled his soldiers on what they might expect.

Marquez and Chou remember invasion-era aliens as well as Bradford: the deceptively childlike sectoids, with grey hairless bodies and overlarge heads and eyes; the oddly jointed and unnaturally pale thin men; the cobbled together half-mechanical floaters held aloft by roaring jets; the brutal and primitive mutons with their armor and rage; the swarms of drones hovering together in clusters; the soldierly outsiders with their crackling tendrils of energy; the clicking and twitching many-legged chryssalids. 

The three of them who fought for XCOM during the invasion have shared what they can with the younger team members, but it’s hard to remember the exact details of fifteen years ago. So much has changed, in any case: sectoids are no longer small and vulnerable, and most of the other aliens have vanished or changed so completely that it’s like comparing apples to oranges. Kenbridge, at least, claims that he’s killed vipers, the strange modern version of the thin men, but Osei and Kelly have mostly focused on ADVENT troopers and not the aliens that command them. Fighting entirely new species, ones that they’ve never seen before, isn’t going to be easy for the more inexperienced members of the team.

It’s part of why he’s drilled this practice run into their heads so many times. Bradford gestures at his squad, and they deploy silently around the hatch they’ve chosen for their breach. The supply craft has several entrances to its inner corridors. The main portal is a hydraulic gate, which descends out of the aft of the ship to create an open-air loading ramp into the cargo holds. That’s too big an area to blow open, so Bradford’s chosen a smaller hatch on the ship’s port side as their means of entry. With the ship’s power offline, they’ll have to breach it the hard way, and that’s likely to attract attention should anything inside be awake and alert enough to respond. 

They move into position around the port hatch. They’ve practiced the breach enough times that everyone knows their role and their spot, and only once each member of his combat squad is in position does Bradford step out of his own cover to assess his team.

It’s too late to make changes. They’ve practiced this assault so many times that to switch anything at this stage would threaten the muscle memory they’ve spent months painstakingly acquiring. Still, Bradford measures distances and positions with cautious eyes, and abandons the position he’ll take in the real assault to lead his team through their next steps. As he steps his way around the sandy floor of the canyon, he begins to reiterate the plan aloud.

Everyone knows their parts, and moves at his orders. They anticipate his verbal walk-through, and stand to press forward in turns, a choreographed wave inching closer one-by-one. No one trips, no one misses a cue. They move in tight and practiced sync, their individual styles blurring as they turn themselves into a team. It’s as smooth a practice as he could hope for, and as much preparation as he can manage without actually risking the mission by blowing open the hatch itself.

“We’ll have the engineers with us tomorrow,” he reminds his squad as they start the long hike out of the canyon. 

“Will any of them be armed?” Marquez asks.

Bradford shakes his head. “No,” he says, and doesn’t remind Marquez that they barely have enough ammo for the combat team, much less for surplus engineers. “Shen’s in charge of them, but don’t hesitate to tell them to keep their heads down if they do something stupid.”

“And they will do something stupid,” Chou agrees. The man’s broad face splits into an easy-going grin. “Engineers are crazy.”

“We’re planning on assaulting an invasion-era supply craft with six guns and four grenades,” Kenbridge points out from his place two people behind Chou in the line they make on the path out of the canyon. “Who are the crazy ones, again?”

So there is laughter and camaraderie as they hike out of the shady canyon back up to the bright spread of sand and sun of the desert above. 

Dinner that night is both strained and lighthearted. No one wants to mention the possibility that some of them will be facing death the next morning, but that knowledge is hard to ignore. Everyone makes an attempt to be cheerful and optimistic, but at times the levity feels forced and hollow. Eat, drink, and be merry, Bradford thinks, and he lifts his cup in a wordless gesture of respect when one of the marketeers makes a long speech he can’t follow in what he thinks is Japanese at the end of the meal. 

Once dinner is over, the first transport out leaves. It’s a rickety, aging station wagon from the old days of fossil fuels and combustion engines, and it coughs to life with a concerning whine and a puff of blue-grey exhaust. Eleven people cram into it, sitting on each other’s laps and carrying satchels and boxes with more equipment to evacuate. Those remaining behind for one last night in Esperanza gather to watch the station wagon’s taillights disappear into the vast darkness of the desert as it slowly makes its way towards civilization. It’s a two-day journey to the closest safehouse, an underground bunker in New Mexico’s mountains: by the time the station wagon makes it to safety, the assault team will be either victorious or dead.

It’s a quiet night, after the transport leaves. There’s still work to be done: a second transport to pack for a morning departure, a medical kit to check over and prepare for use, weapons to clean and double-check. But Bradford dismisses Kelly and Marquez from their watch duties that night. They all might die in the morning, he thinks; they deserve a decent night’s sleep beforehand, if nothing else. Besides, Esperanza has gone two years without attracting ADVENT attention — they can afford to let watch slide for a single night. 

It’s dangerous thinking, and Bradford knows that, but he still waves Kelly and Marquez away from the sentry tower and gives them the evening off. There’s not much left for any of them to do at this point, but still, his team takes the time to sit together and check over gear and supplies that have been sorted and double-checked over and over again already. When night falls, and there’s not even the pretense of any kind of work left to do, the six of them gather together in the bunkhouse they share.

Bradford has a single bottle of home-brewed tequila stored away in his foot locker. It was a gift from Maria, the Mexican lady who runs the second supply team; he’s fairly sure her second son was the one to distill it. Once the door to their cramped bunkhouse is shut, he waits for his team to settle themselves around their makeshift barracks, and only then does Bradford bring the tequila out.

There aren’t shotglasses enough to go around, and there’s not enough room in the little shed they use as a barracks to have a place to line up six glasses in a row anyway. There’s barely enough room for all six of them to be awake in the shed at once, and Bradford thinks this might be the first time they’ve attempted it. Kelly sits on the edge of her top bunk, leaning forward a little because even as small as she is, her hair brushes the bare wooden beams over her head. Osei half-reclines in his bed on the bunk beneath her, tucking strong legs up onto the sheets to keep them out of the small shared space between the bunks. Marquez squeezes his big body on top of the footlocker he shares with Kenbridge. Chou and Kenbridge stand besides Bradford, rangy bodies loose and limber, and they’ve positioned themselves so that even as oddly positioned as the others are, they form a strange sort of circle in front of the stacked bunk beds in the cramped shed.

Bradford unscrews the cap from the tequila bottle, and keeping the cap in his hand, he wordlessly offers the bottle to Chou. He’s known Chou for nearly sixteen years, and knows the man dislikes tequila. But the old soldier doesn’t hesitate: he lifts the square glass bottle to his mouth, and swallows a decent bit of the amber liquid without flinching. As he finishes, he holds the bottle out to Kenbridge, who stands at his side.

Kenbridge knocks back his own sip quickly, and almost chokes on it, surprised by the speed with which the alcohol floods out of the bottle and into his mouth. Chou pounds his back, and though Kenbridge’s face is red and his eyes are watering, he passes the bottle on to Osei without hesitation or comment. 

Osei takes the bottle warily, sips at it far more cautiously than Kenbridge, and then he stretches out a long arm to give the bottle to Marquez. Marquez takes a long, slow gulp — he’s the only one of them who actually likes tequila. He stands to pass the bottle up to Kelly where she sits on the top bunk. Kelly’s new to this ritual, but doesn’t disrupt it: she swallows down her share of the liquor without wincing, and leans down from her perch to hold the bottle out for Bradford when she’s done.

Bradford takes his own turn with the tequila. The neck of the bottle is warm from being passed from hand to hand; the tequila is harsh and potent and not as smooth as it should be. When he’s had his share, he simply caps the bottle and replaces it in his footlocker. There’s plenty left in it for another round or two, but getting drunk isn’t the point. The point is the sharing and the equality of passing the bottle from hand to hand: they are going to trust their lives to each other in the morning, and some of them might not come back. So tonight they drink with each other for a final time, recognizing their intrinsic bond as comrades-in-arms and acknowledging the somber reality of the situation. 

They won’t say any farewells in the morning, when they suit up and prepare to face death. But tomorrow night, or whenever the dust settles, if they’re still alive and the tequila is still shut away in Bradford’s footlocker, they’ll come back to the alcohol together again, to toast to the dead and drink to the living.

No one speaks as they ready themselves for bed, and when Marquez flips off the light and the shed settles into darkness, it takes long minutes before everyone’s breathing evens out into the rhythmic pattern of sleep. Bradford lies in his own bunk and stares up at the slats of Chou’s bunk above him until he can pick apart the breaths of his squadmates. Chou’s easiest to distinguish, as he’s closest, but Bradford strains his ears and focuses until he can hear the wheeze in Kenbridge’s lungs and the faint huff of Marquez’s deliberate breathing. It’s harder to make out the slow inhale-exhale Osei is clearly using as a way to calm himself for sleep and the nearly soundless pattern to Kelly’s breathing, but eventually Bradford manages it. 

Only once everyone’s breathing has slowed and settled into something deep and even does Bradford close his eyes. It’s never easy to sleep the night before a mission, much less when the mission itself has such potential to end disastrously. But he believes in what he’s fighting for, and he trusts the men and woman he’ll be risking everything alongside.

It takes time for Bradford to slow his own breathing, to calm himself enough to allow his mind to start to drift. But eventually, as the warm night wind whistles its way through the many cracks of their cramped barracks, Bradford takes comfort in listening to his squadmates sleep around him, and follows them into sleep.


	4. 01-04: Acquiring Momentum

# Acquisitions

## Section 1: Winning the Ground

### Chapter 4: Acquiring Momentum

The morning of the assault opens like almost every other day they’ve spent in Esperanza: dry and hot.

The settlement is a hive of activity long before the sun rises high enough to scorch the ground. Two transports still remain in Esperanza: one will stay, as an emergency transport for those remaining to assault and hopefully claim the supply ship, and the other one is being loaded with the last of the surplus materials and sensitive information in case the mission goes horribly wrong and Esperanza itself is compromised. It doesn’t take long to load: they’ve had all the previous day to work on it. 

A tall young woman with choppy black hair and singed fingers stands in front of the van, booted toes scuffing in the sand and her lower lip caught between her teeth. Dr. Shen stands before her, hands on her shoulders, and Bradford waits with the rest of Esperanza off to the side as they say their farewells. All of them are doing their best to be unobtrusive, to give father and daughter this moment together in peace. None of the rest of them have family here, and she’s the youngest member of this battered XCOM: most of them have a soft spot for her, which doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier.

“I don’t want to go,” Shen’s daughter tells him miserably. “I could help you, Dad. I’m good at decryption, and you could use another engineer to help with the power conversion you’ll need to do to get the main generator online again.”

“I know,” Shen says softly, and wraps her in a hug. “But I need you to go to the safehouse. You can keep working on that drone of yours, and hopefully by tonight I’ll be able to bring you all the spare parts you’ll ever need.”

Normally she looks stubborn, a young woman ready to face the world; now she looks very young, and uncomfortably close to being on the verge of tears. “I want to stay with you,” she chokes out, and buries her head against her father’s shoulder.

Bradford looks away. He doesn’t like watching Shen say what could be his last farewell to his daughter. This is a dangerous mission. Suicidal, more likely: there are cryotanks in the supply ship, and they haven’t dared fully scout the ship to find out how many are still intact. They could be facing an entire transport full of invasion-era forces with a squad hall-full of rookies and with four engineers to defend into the bargain. He and his combat squad will at least be armed and armored, but the engineers they’re escorting have the more complicated job of deciphering the alien ship’s systems, and they’re going into the mission without so much as a handgun between them. 

It’s going to be tough on all of them, but the engineers will be the most vulnerable, and everyone knows it. Bradford turns his shoulders so he’s not facing the Shens, and finds that most of the people standing with him are doing the same: remaining close to show their support, rather awkwardly looking away to show their respect. They start to pass the last items to pack away onto the transport between them, a small relay moving the piled gear from the tables into the vehicle. It’s something to do as Shen and his daughter murmur their goodbyes in quiet tones, and it needs to be done in any case.

Shen holds his daughter in the circle of his arms as the transport is loaded, and only when the engine has started and there’s no more time to spend on sentiment does he pull away from her. “An-Yi,” he begins, and then, as her jaw thrusts stubbornly out, he corrects himself. “Lily,” he says instead, calling her the name she’s chosen for her life with XCOM. It’s an acknowledgment of her adulthood, of her value to him as an engineer as well as a daughter. It’s an acceptance of what she’s chosen to devote her life to, and pride that she’s chosen his cause as her own. 

Her face softens, and she blinks back tears Bradford does his best to not see.

“I love you,” Shen tells her gently. “Be safe.”

“I love you too, Daddy,” she says, and her voice chokes on the words. Bradford looks determinedly into the distance, trying not to think about how she usually simply calls her father by the shorter and less sentimental _Dad_. “Stay safe.”

Dr. Shen remains by the chain-link gate as the transport starts its engine and slowly begins to rattle its way out of Esperanza. He watches the van until it’s nothing more than a glint of metal and glass at the head of a trail of dust far down the road. Bradford stands awkwardly at his side, even as the few remaining members of Esperanza move away to begin preparing for the mission.

Bradford is unused to family, to love, to the worry specifically over someone precious. But his presence and quiet solidarity is the only aid he can offer to Shen. Shen has been his friend and comrade for the better part of two decades, and Shen deserves whatever support he can muster. So despite the heat and the dust and the slightly strained silence, Bradford plants himself at Shen’s side, so the older man at least does not have to stand alone as he watches his daughter evacuate towards safety.

“It never gets any easier,” Shen murmurs at last as the transport finally tips out of sight in the far distance. His smile is almost wry when he looks up at Bradford, his eyes weary behind his bifocals. “You would think I would remember that, eventually.” And he claps Bradford on the shoulder, gratitude and respect implicit in the grip of his hand, and then Shen turns toward the barn where his three remaining engineers are waiting for him.

Bradford doesn’t follow him. He goes instead to the little outbuilding where his own team is waiting. They’re preparing more or less in silence, and he joins them without comment. Despite the heat, they strap what little body armor they’ve salvaged onto their bodies, and load themselves down with every spare bit of firepower they can carry. The outbuilding is cramped — it’s both armory and storage, and at one point the cook had been keeping chickens penned up in it, so there’s a fine layer of sawdust and feathers still present on the floor. They shuffle around each other in the tight quarters, used to working within the limitations of a space not designed to hold so many people.

Bradford misses the professionalism of XCOM, of the Special Forces and the Army before that. The last time he’d officially been sent into the field, he’d been twenty-nine and proud of his rank in the Special Forces; there’d been a briefing, checklists, an official target, a clear hierarchy of command. He’d moved into more removed assignments after that, and that had been the last of his fieldwork for a long while. He had coordinated assaults for the Special Forces for a few years, and he’d done well enough in command there that he’d been promoted and transfered to XCOM. He’d become Central there, and the call-sign he’d adopted reflected that he’d been responsible for commanding and directing and coordinating from headquarters without the need to go into the field himself. 

But XCOM had been destroyed by the aliens, ripped to shreds and all but annihilated, and Bradford had picked up a rifle for the first time in years as he fought to salvage something out of the loss in the desperate retreat he’d led for those who had survived. Since then, he’s become a ground soldier again, comfortable once more with carrying a rifle instead of just an officer’s pistol. He’s learned to be a front-line fighter again, for all he still wears the call-sign of Central like a second skin, and despite his age, he finds something satisfying in being able to actually pit himself against the aliens out in the field. Ground-side operations aren’t as easy on him as they were twenty years ago when he’d been thirty and in better physical condition, but Bradford still likes knowing that he’s able to put a target down and push forward to make a difference.

He can’t count the number of times he’s struck out against the aliens in the fifteen years since XCOM fell, but most of those had been solo missions or ambushes coordinated with just one or two other veterans. This is the first time in nearly twenty years that he’ll be acting as a squad leader on the ground for a combat mission, and he approaches the responsibility with the same professionalism he’s always given his soldiers.

He has a team again for the first time in decades, and despite how long it’s been, his old pre-mission habits from his days as a Special Forces team leader are still there. He moves between his soldiers, checking their gear and wishing for the days of funding and official support as he sees how poorly equipped they truly are. Osei’s chest armor is too small, but there’s none that fits better. Marquez quite literally has duct tape and a patched soldering job keeping the butt of his rifle together. Kenbridge has no armor, just a red bandana tied across his forehead to keep thick hair from his eyes and a padded motorcycle jacket in bright colors with gaudy advertisements plastered across the chest. Chou’s armor is old – as old as XCOM – and worn, nearly as decrepit as the organization that first gave it to him. Kelly’s armor is laughably light, an old black vest that still bears the word POLICE in white letters across the back of her shoulders; her shotgun is old, and only has eight cartridges, so she carries one of their four grenades as backup and has an impressive buck knife strapped to her thigh.

Bradford’s own kit is just as patchwork as everyone else’s. He has an assault rifle from the glory days of government funding, the pistol he’d acquired six years ago from a raid on an ADVENT troop supply truck, and a partial set of body armor that is so dinged and dented there are more spots with scars than without.

“Remember what we talked about yesterday,” he tells his team as he finishes cinching Marquez’s shoulder straps tight. He claps a hand down on the big man’s shoulder as he finishes, and gets a calm nod in return. “Move fast but not stupid, and cover your partner. Our priority is the command bridge. Don’t touch any of the cryotanks – we’ll see how far we can get with a dead ship — but be ready for an unexpected activation. Keep an eye out for outsider shards, and follow breach protocol.”

He looks around the small room at his team, one last chance to check them over. He starts with his veterans out of habit: Chou and Marquez.

Chou is the only other one of the group besides Bradford who’s over the age of forty-five: he’s forty-nine, slender and wiry and twitchy in a way he hadn’t been fifteen years ago when he’d been one of twelve Chinese soldiers officially sent by their government to join XCOM. His head is shaved, but not in a military style: he’s completely bald, like a monk out of old kung-fu action movies. “It makes me look tough,” he’d told Kenbridge with a wink the day before, as he’d sat with a razor and a shard of broken mirror propped up on one of Esperanza’s dinner tables to shave one last time before the mission.

Marquez is the biggest of the squad, bulky and wide, with his hair freshly buzzed down and a brace locked into place on his bad ankle. His nose has been broken more times than Bradford can count, but that predates XCOM — rugby in Puerto Rico, Marquez had said, and a brief foray into American football in his youth before he’d enlisted in the Marines. He’d only been twenty-four when he’d joined XCOM all those years ago; now there are faint traces of crow’s feet around his eyes, but those eyes are calm.

Everyone else is still unproven — Kelly, Kenbridge, and Osei. 

Kelly’s probably next, if he’s going by age: he’s still not quite sure how old she is, but Bradford puts her in her mid-thirties, probably fairly close to Marquez in age. She’s pulled back her dark hair into a ponytail, and has a grey baseball hat pulled down over her forehead to block out the harsh desert sun. She’s self-contained where she stands besides Marquez, small against the larger man’s broad size; there are no jitters or nerves to give away any sign of apprehension at what her future holds.

Kenbridge just celebrated his thirtieth birthday two weeks ago. His thick dark hair is tangled up behind the bandanna he uses to keep it pulled off his face. His dark eyes are bright and almost glassy: anxiety, Bradford thinks, and the urge to prove himself. It’s a dangerous combination, and he’ll need to be steadied before they make the breach. 

Osei, though, is just as calm as Kelly and somehow more professional: he stands with a straight spine and a focused look, in a way that reminds Bradford of a soldier at parade rest during an inspection. He’s only twenty-six, but Bradford thinks he’s got the makings of a good team leader — he’s the strong and silent type, always willing to step up and get the job done.

Bradford looks one last time from face to face. He sees a hint of fear, a brief glimpse of tight anticipation, but no hesitation. So he picks up his own rifle, carefully preserved and meticulously improved since the day he’d grabbed it on his way out of XCOM’s first fallen base. “Right,” he says, and glances around at their set and composed faces. “Let’s do this.”

It takes just under an hour to hike down into the canyon and approach the alien supply craft. They’ve made this trip dozens of times over the past few months, and it’s almost surreal to know that this time isn’t a practice run. The sun glints off the canyon walls at first, until they’ve descended down deep enough to reach where the shade begins. The ecosystem shifts once they’re sheltered by the canyon from the winds and sun of the desert land above them. Down out of the direct heat, there are stubby trees clinging to life on the steep walls, short spindly cacti growing larger than their more exposed counterparts, and thorny bramble-like bushes reaching out with spindly arms. The terrain changes as well: there are more rocks, and something closer to soil than the sand above. There’s the memory of water visible in the way the ground is shaped in the canyon — areas where their boots have already tromped a path through the tracks of old mudslides or half-collapsed banks carved by flash floods.

The more varied terrain gives them more to work with in terms of cover than the wind-swept and sun-baked desert floor above them, and they’ve had months to choose how they’ll approach the supply craft. They’ve done enough scouting that Bradford’s team moves into position around the back of the vessel without prompting. Everyone has their assigned spot, and his team ranges out into position behind rocks and broken outreaches of the canyon walls with careful precision, ready to begin the breach. There are no nerves here, no hesitation: they are as sure and as silent as they were during their many practices. 

Shen and his engineers hang back, keeping in cover behind the rocks of the canyon walls. The four of them cluster together, trying to keep their heads down and follow in the footsteps of the more confident soldiers, but they have spent their time in Esperanza in the engineering barn and not exploring the canyon. This terrain is new to them. The supply ship itself is strange to them, as they’re more familiar with printed layouts and engineering specs of the vessel rather than the worn and wrecked bulk of the thing crashed into the canyon floor in front of them.

The ship is dead, and after a solid two minutes of waiting in position just in case something has changed, Bradford gestures at Chou to officially start the assault. 

Chou carries most of their grenades. He’d been a heavy munitions officer back when XCOM had differentiated between what specialty a solider might be best suited to. Now, the only differentiation is between civilians and those willing to risk death to kill aliens or ADVENT; the soldiers themselves don’t have enough resources to really specialize further.

Still, Chou is good with explosives, and so he carries three of their four grenades. He’s had months to consider his angles and positions, so he moves quickly, hands deft and sure, to place his first grenade at the port hatch. It’s a hard breach only because they have to physically crack the hatch open: no systems are running, so any way of opening the door electronically is impossible. It takes two of their four precious grenades to get the door open enough for a careful entry, but no forces greet them once the hatch blows open and no inner alarms sound. 

Bradford waits long, tense minutes before ordering his troops forward, unwilling to trust the silence of the ship’s inner hallways. He and Chou take point, mostly because they have the best armor of the team. Behind them come Kenbridge and Kelly, with the worst armor and with weapons more suited to close-quarters combat; Marquez and Osei cover the rear, herding the engineers in front of them like shepherds.

The hallways are dark. Emergency light very faintly shines from where the floor meets the walls: not run by a generator, Bradford thinks, but instead simply glowing like phosphorescence. It casts a strange blue light across everyone’s faces, throwing the hollows of their eyes into shadows, so that everyone looks more worried than they already are.

They maneuver through two long corridors, until Shen gestures at a ladder to the right of them. Moving up to a higher deck is nerve-wracking — they go single file, cautious and alert, until everyone has stepped off the ladder onto the next deck. 

There are four decks to go, but on the third deck, Shen lifts his hand to request a pause. He kneels by the side of a tall column filled with slowly blinking lights, and with the help of two of his engineers, opens up an access hatch beneath it. “There is still some power,” Shen says quietly, after studying the tangle of cords and electronics revealed by the hatch. “Some reserves are still running.” He gently replaces the panel. He looks up at Bradford, who is standing at the corner of the next intersection, and raises his voice slightly to be heard.

“It is likely the cryotanks are still active,” he says. “We should take care not to activate them.”

“Understood,” Bradford says, and they press forward. They’ve passed a few of the cryotanks as they’ve traveled: long, cylindrical tubes neatly lining the sides of cargo bays. Cracking one open, Shen has cautioned, will likely restart whatever system is keeping the rest in stasis — so despite the temptation, they’ve done their best to ignore the cryotanks when they find them. 

There is another deck left to clear on their way to the bridge. Bradford leads his team through it in silence. They communicate by the hand gestures Marquez and Chou had so patiently taught the newer soldiers, and though Bradford can see nerves in how Kenbridge’s finger tenses where it rests against the safety of his gun, his squad is remarkably steady as they press forward. They carefully step through the ship’s corridors, checking every corner, every door. One of the engineers slips on the final ladder, and the kit she’s carrying clangs into the metal wall with a bang that seems deafeningly loud in the tense silence. Guns come up almost automatically, and they wait: but the echo fades, and nothing moves.

They reach the bridge with no enemy contact. It’s quiet and dark, illuminated by the same blue emergency lighting as the hallways. There’s a faint hum of power, but there is no whine of generators, no roar of engines, no static displays. More importantly, at first glance, Bradford can see no glowing orange outsider shards waiting to activate. Lights blink faintly from half-a-dozen consoles, and he surveys the area briefly before he gestures his team forward. He and Chou lead the way; behind them, Kelly and Kenbridge step into the enclosed room and immediately split to cover opposite sides, guns held high and tight and at the ready. Only after the four of them manage a thorough sweep of the open bridge does Bradford gesture at Marquez to allow Shen and his people to step forward. 

The engineers step onto the darkened bridge slowly, looking around them in trepidation and awe. Bradford can’t blame them: it’s bigger than he thought the room would be, and far more open. For all it’s very alien, he can recognize duty stations in the shape of the consoles and railings lining the edges of the room. Lights blink, slow and silent, from dozens of monitors and otherwise blank displays. Bradford does one final glance around the room, and then he nods. “Dr. Shen,” he says, and gestures at the bridge in invitation. “It’s all yours.”

Shen moves forward without hesitation toward a console to the left of the main display. “We will attempt to disable any distress beacons or automatic transmitters first,” Dr. Shen says calmly, for all there’s a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. He moves to one of the main consoles at the back of the bridge, and after a careful inspection, he presses a series of commands into it. Monitors and displays flicker to life around the bridge, but nothing else happens: after a fraught, expectant silence, he nods. “We should be able to manage from here if we’re careful to not set off any alarms or reactivation protocols. Then we can move on, as planned, to see if we can prevent any cryotanks from activating.”

His engineers step into place around him at various consoles, opening up their kits and turning to the alien technology surrounding them. Bradford moves to command his own troops. He gestures in quick, decisive motions, directing his squad to stand watch at set points. Still in pairs, his team moves into their places around the bridge just as they practiced on the hot desert sands above them.

Bradford is doing a second, far more thorough sweep of the bridge when he hears a sharp click from behind him. Almost immediately, the rest of the bridge’s lights power on; some engine, somewhere deep in the bowels of the alien craft, creaks to screeching life. His squad all lift their heads, almost in unison, suddenly on the alert; fingers tighten on guns and Bradford can hear the quick indrawn breaths as people realize the ship is coming to life around them.

Thomas, an engineer with a white goatee and a wrinkled face, stands stricken at a console. “They’re reactivating,” he croaks, and that’s all Bradford needs to hear to know that things have taken a very sharp turn for the worse.

“Hunker down,” he orders the engineers, and he vaults across a console to take better cover himself. “Cover the doorway. Shen, see if you can’t find a way to slow them down!”

“There’s an alert,” Shen says tersely, crouching beside a computer terminal. His fingers fly across the alien symbols indented into the table in front of it. “Cryotanks are activating – ten – no, fifteen; no, more –” When he looks back up at Bradford, his face is pale. “They will likely attempt to muster here.”

Bradford swears, and lifts his rifle. “All right,” he says to his team, even as he hears a door open somewhere down the hallway that leads to the bridge. “Here we go.”

His combat team leans into their covers, steady and as prepared as they can be for what’s coming.

“Cover the doorway,” Bradford repeats, and points. “Osei, Marquez, take the center; Kenbridge, Kelly, on the right.”

He doesn’t have time to continue outlining the plan they’ve rehearsed for just this contingency before there’s the skittering of alien feet on metal flooring, and then the harsh growl of rocket engines. Both are noises he hasn’t heard in years, and it’s almost surprising at how swiftly his mind recognizes each and instantly finds them threatening.

He hasn’t seen pre-invasion aliens in a while. The sectoids look small, almost childishly fragile, and the floaters are ugly, inelegant monstrosities of engines and rage. These are aliens as they first came to Earth, before they’d tinkered with the human genome and what its addition might do to sectoid evolution, before they’d streamlined their floater designs to look more patrician and less intimidating. It’s tempting to underestimate them by comparing them to the modern sectoids and the improved archons, but that temptation is deadly. 

Bradford’s almost grateful that there are only sectoids and floaters. They aren’t the worst combatants the alien ship could have thrown at them — the smaller sectoids are mostly scouts rather than shock troopers, and floaters don’t deal out the same amount of damage that the thin men’s poison or a muton’s rage could have directed at them. These aren’t the most powerful aliens, nor even the smartest or toughest.

But there are just so many of them — what seems like an endless wave of enormous black eyes and fiery engines — and Bradford and his team only have so many bullets.


	5. 01-05: Acquiring Purpose

# Acquisitions

## Section 1: Winning the Ground

### Chapter 5: Acquiring Purpose

Bradford tries to keep an eye on everything, and fails. Maybe if he’d been directing the operation from some central command station, he’d have organized the battle better. If he’d been the Commander, he thinks grimly, he’d have planned for the sheer overwhelming numbers of their opponents. But it’s hard to issue orders when he’s on the ground himself, and it’s a poor situation in the first place. He has to trust his team to think for themselves, and three of them have never been in a fight like this before and all of them are worried about their already small supply of additional ammunition.

Behind him, he can hear Shen issuing orders to his engineers, who are all crouched behind consoles trying to follow Shen’s instructions. But Bradford can’t look to see what they’re doing: he’s on point, on the left side of the doorway, and every time he looks around the corner into the hallway to pick his next target, it seems like the hallway is swarming with even more aliens than before.

Thomas falls first, a lucky shot ricocheting down the center of the bridge from the hallway. Kenbridge empties the clips of both his pistols at once into a sectoid, and a floater catches him in the back as he turns to reload. Chou stands his ground in the doorway until he’s overwhelmed, buying time for the others to fall back; he’s cut down as he attempts his own retreat, but the grenade he went down holding at least buys the rest of them time enough to take new cover further back on the bridge.

The sectoids are psionic, the strange unnatural and unwelcome mind-control ability humans still don’t fully understand. It gives them another advantage, one Bradford and his team can’t predict. Their disturbing ability to control minds isn’t always successful, but it’s a worrying threat all the same, volatile and unpredictable and devastating when it works. A sectoid leans forward and gestures at Georgia, and there’s a burst of psionic energy: Georgia staggers up out of cover in the middle of a shouted conversation with Shen, her face scrawled into a grimace, and she launches herself at Osei’s unarmored back quickly enough the tall man is taken by surprise and goes down under her unarmed assault. Gunfire from the floaters aimed at Osei kills her before she’s herself again, but it takes precious seconds for Osei to recover, to roll out of the way of the bullets and the dead engineer’s collapsed body, and they need him firing his gun and not hauling himself back up to his feet.

The battle becomes a blur of noise and images. Shen is shouting at Rishi and Osei is lurching back to his feet, bringing his gun back up too slowly. Bradford can smell the ozone-tinged scent of the sectoid’s guns even as the high-pitched whine of the plasma charging up screams through his ears. He tries to tune out the rest of the world, to narrow his focus down to what matters. There is a sectoid centered in his scope; he squeezes the trigger almost automatically, trusting in skill and habit. The sectoid drops with a squeal. There’s the solid pump of Kelly’s shotgun and an inhuman screeching scream as a second sectoid falls. There’s a brief pause: the doorway is, for a few seconds, clear. Bradford sees his chance, and takes it.

He pushes forward to retake the doorway even as a floater flies forward through it. There’s the report of a heavy gun, and the floater goes down in abrupt pieces thanks to Marquez’s expert marksmanship. Bradford’s shoulder slams into the wall beside the hatch into the hallway, and he leans out to take another shot into the hallway as Shen’s strained voice lifts in more urgent orders to his one remaining engineer. 

The world narrows further. There’s alien blood in the hallway, and his own blood pulsing loudly in his ears. He takes cover using the side of the doorway, and does his best to simply stay alive. Marquez shouts, surprise and pain, and goes quiet; his gun stops firing, which is just as worrisome. Osei makes his way forward to stand across from Bradford on the opposite side of the doorway, and he holds position there for several shots before he takes a hit and stumbles back towards the computer console. Somewhere behind him, Kelly launches their fourth and final grenade into the hallway, neatly bouncing it off the wall in a bank shot that involves at least as much luck as skill. It clears the hallway for a precious second, and when the aliens regroup, there’s less of them than there had been before.

Everything ends when Bradford steps out of cover to take down the last floater. There’s still a sectoid left, crouched behind the doorway waiting for him, but the floater has shot Osei once and Marquez twice: the big man is barely breathing, and Osei’s right arm dangles uselessly. Kelly’s shotgun is out of ammo, and she’s positioned too far across the bridge to help him take out the two remaining hostiles in any case; she shouts something, face tight, but he can’t make out her words against the roaring of his pulse in his ears. Bradford considers the situation, the stress and pain in Shen’s voice and the flickering overhead lights, and weighs his own safety against how poorly everything else has gone.

He steps out of cover into the doorway, and finally gains a clear line of sight toward the remaining floater.

He takes the floater down with a single shot. It crashes to the floor with a screech and the popping noise of overstressed electronics. Bradford doesn’t have time to move; he knows he’s left himself open for the sectoid to take a point-blank shot, and he knows that’s the price he must pay for bringing down the floater. He’s raising his hand in some vain attempt to defend himself from the attack he knows is coming from when Kelly vaults over the center console and bolts to his side. 

He shouts a warning, wordless and harsh, and she ignores it. Instead, she slides to a halt just beside him, close enough to reach out and touch the sectoid. The sectoid seems as shocked as Bradford; it takes a long second to stare at her with unblinking huge eyes, too stunned to react, before it raises its arm to fire its wrist-mounted plasma gun.

Kelly doesn’t give it the chance to fire at her. She’s got a piece of pipe in her hands – railing, maybe, or part of the ship’s infrastructure exposed by Chou’s grenade – and she brings it down with a brutal and precise swing into the sectoid’s skull. Bone cracks like eggshell; the sectoid crumples with a pitiful shriek, and Kelly stands panting over it.

Bradford drags her back into cover with him without thinking, a hand on her collar to simply haul her bodily back as he tucks them down into safety behind a half-melted computer console. He takes the opportunity to reload his rifle a final time, fingers fast and firm as he adds the last clip he has to his gun, and then he risks poking his head up over the console to peer down the hallway. Nothing stirs. Behind him, Shen gives a short groan, but Bradford doesn’t dare look back yet. 

“Take the right,” he orders Kelly, who is huddling against the console beside him. Still gripping her steel pipe in white-knuckled hands, she nods, and together they advance back up to the doorway. When that proves clear, they push forward again, into the hallway – but there’s nothing there but bodies.

The bridge is quiet when they return. Rishi, the last of Shen’s three engineers still standing, is shutting down one of the consoles with distracted and hurried hands. Shen sits behind him, propped against the console, his eyes open and vaguely surprised. He’s breathing shallowly but doesn’t appear to be injured. Osei is kneeling next to Marquez, his good hand applying pressure to Marquez’s chest and the gasping wound there.

What remains of Chou is in the doorway; Kenbridge is sprawled at awkward angles across a side table on the left side of the bridge. Georgia’s body is still and bloody, draped across a display which is vainly trying to flicker to life around her, and Thomas is slumped lifelessly over the computer terminal that caused this mess. 

Bradford assesses the situation with a sinking heart. It’s too early to call it a victory, but even if they have won the day, the cost is already too high. He checks the full clip of ammo in his gun, glances around the room once more, and makes his decision.

He hands his rifle to Kelly without looking at her. “Shoot anything that moves,” he tells her, and leaves her to it: she’s their worst shot, but she’s uninjured, which makes her the best chance they’ve got for a sentry at the moment. She almost fumbles the gun when he gives it to her, and the pipe she’d turned into a weapon clatters loudly against the metal floor when she drops it to take the rifle. He doesn’t bother to apologize for the abrupt transfer. Instead, he strides over to Rishi and kneels beside Shen where he sits on the floor. “Situation report,” he barks to the still-standing engineer, already running his hands across Shen’s limbs and torso to check for wounds.

“That should have been the last of them,” the Indian engineer answers, his words quick and clipped, his attention on the console monitors in front of him. “No other cryotanks are reporting activation, and Dr. Shen shut down the distress beacon before any message went out. We should be safe enough at the moment – I can’t find any sign of reinforcements.” He looks away from the console, and drops to his knees besides Dr. Shen, propping the older man up as he begins to slump.

It’s an incomplete report, but good enough for the time being. Bradford turns his full attention to Shen, leaning over the older man. Shen is pale, his breathing reedy and thin, and there’s panic in his eyes. “Are you hurt?” Bradford asks urgently, opening up the front of Shen’s green jacket, searching for blood.

“Heart,” the chief engineer wheezes. And then, more worrisome, “An-Yi?”

Heart attack, Bradford realizes at once, and his stomach drops to his feet. Shen’s had heart trouble before – the man’s in his late seventies, and resistance life hasn’t been easy for him – but for it to strike here, now, when they are so close, so surprisingly successful, so unexpectedly victorious… 

Bradford hauls in an unsteady breath, suddenly shaky in a way even the combat hadn’t managed to make him. Bitterly, he thinks of the marvels of medical science, of cardiac surgery and the miracles skilled doctors can work. For a foolish moment he considers the battlefield first aid measures he’s been taught to help keep dying soldiers breathing long enough to get them to a hospital — the emergency cocktail of adrenaline and painkillers he carries clipped to his belt, how to perform CPR and how to restart a stopped heart —and then he calculates how far away they are from any medical facility, much less one that would welcome Shen without reporting him to ADVENT. 

Bradford leans forward, grabs Shen’s shoulder when Shen begins to slide away from Rishi. “She’s safe, Doctor,” he says, putting as much conviction behind his words as he can, using his arm to keep Shen sitting upright. “We’re safe here. She’s safe.”

“Good.” And Shen’s breathing stutters, almost fails. Bradford fumbles for his wrist, pushes Shen’s jacket sleeve up to expose skin, and tries to position his fingers along the veins in the older man’s arm. His own pulse is thundering, and it takes long seconds for him to find Shen’s weaker heartbeat, fluttering like a trapped creature under his fingertips. But the old man is determined. Even though he’s gasping for breath, he looks up and around the scarred bridge. “Ours?”

“Ours,” Bradford assures him, though that hardly seems to matter now. “We won.”

“Good,” Shen says. He hauls in a breath, winces. Bradford’s mind races to find options, but there’s nothing he can do. “Need… engineers. Computer scientists… learn programs. I have… plans…” Shen leans his head back on the terminal behind him. “An-Yi… Lily… will help.” His mouth turns upward in a smile even as he gasps for breath and fumbles to grip Bradford’s shoulder. “My little… girl…”

He dies sitting on the floor of the bridge, between one breath and the next, flanked by Bradford and Rishi and trying to say his daughter’s name.

“Dr. Shen?” Rishi asks quietly. After a moment, he repeats himself, sounding more lost: “Dr. Shen?”

Bradford exhales slowly, gathering his resolve, and then he reaches out with a steady hand to shut Shen’s eyes. Rishi sits back on his heels, takes one of Shen’s hands in his, and weeps. 

Bradford rises blindly. He takes two steps away, and leans against a console. Osei looks up with him, dark face tight with pain and worry. There’s his own blood soaking his right sleeve down to his wrist, and his hands are stained red with Marquez’s blood where they are pressed against Marquez’s chest. Marquez is unconscious, but the veteran is at least still breathing thanks to Osei keeping steady pressure on his wound. 

Kelly stands sentinel at the edge of the doorway, frightened and overwhelmed, his rifle overlarge and awkward in her hands. Bradford sucks in a pained breath, and moves to join her at the doorway almost without consciously deciding to move. He orders her to hold position with a gesture, and steps out of the bridge into the corridor beyond it. The hallway is filled with bodies – floaters in pieces and sectoid corpses – and he takes a long minute to consider them, to stare at the wall and to silently, motionlessly rage against the loss of a man he’s trusted and respected for more than fifteen years.

It has been a long time since he’s lost a friend to natural causes. Bradford doesn’t see the wall in front of him or the blood coating his boots; he shuts his eyes, and takes a deep breath, drawing his focus back from his grief.

When he does move again, he whirls with such speed that Kelly lifts his rifle almost reflexively, trying to spot what startled him into abrupt motion.

He crosses the hall to her, and takes back his gun. It’s a comforting weight in his arms, and helps ground him in what he needs to do. “You’re the fastest, and you’re not injured,” he tells Kelly, slinging his rifle across his back. He pulls his pistol from his thigh holster and offers it to her. “Johan’s back at the settlement – get him down her as fast as you can with his med kit. Marquez needs attention now, and Osei’s arm will need to be seen to. Get Ricardo on the radio and get our people back here – this ship’s ours now, and we’re damn well going to use it.”

Sending a single person through the now-powered ship to go for help, no matter how fast she is or how used she is to working on her own, is a dangerous risk. Kelly, to her credit, gives him a fairly steady nod and doesn’t argue. She takes the pistol and moves off into the hallway with cautious speed, and Bradford steps back into the bridge room and moves to relieve Osei. He pulls being Central around him like a shield, and sets Rishi to work salvaging what he can and orders Osei to apply a tourniquet to his own arm.

It’s an hour and a half before Kelly is back with Johan, which is remarkably fast considering that it usually took them forty minutes to hike back up to Esperanza from the canyon floor. She’s breathing hard and her hands have new cuts across them, but Johan is unharmed and Bradford’s pistol is returned to him with a full clip. 

It takes them another hour for Johan to stabilize Marquez, and two more to carefully haul the big man up out of the canyon to Esperanza. He’s in poor shape, and after a brief deliberation, Bradford makes the call to send him into the nearest city center for reconstructive surgery. It requires another four hours to get him organized for the trip – it takes that long for Ricardo to sort through their collection of false identification to find one that can withstand a hospital’s scrutiny. Johan keeps Marquez sedated and stable, but they send him off on a wave of uncertainty. He might not survive the trip; he might not survive the surgery that will surely be required to repair his bullet-riddled torso. Even if he lives through his injuries, his false identification might fail: ADVENT might take him out of the hospital, interrogate or kill him, and use what he knows about XCOM to hunt them down. 

Bradford doesn’t know if he’s doing the right thing. Marquez is unconscious, and being a self-sacrificing bastard he’d probably refuse the risk if were he awake. Bradford makes the decision for him, though, and sends him with Ricardo into the city center to find a surgeon that won’t ask too many questions.

Osei’s arm will be out of commission for three weeks, but it’s at least something Johan can handle with sutures and a splint. The graze Bradford hadn’t noticed on his shoulder is cleaned, and Kelly is given eight stitches across her left palm, where something sharp had managed to slice through her skin during her rushed clamber up the canyon back to Esperanza.

Sixteen hours after breaching the supply ship’s port hatch, in the dark quiet of an all but empty Esperanza, Bradford gives the order for Ricardo to send out the coded message to the evacuated remnants of Esperanza. He chooses the code himself, using the old cultural shortcuts XCOM’s been relying on for a decade. 

They send messages using single words and short phrases: bare snippets of information that contain boiled-down cultural references that can coalesce into messages the aliens can’t understand. Bradford picks out the one wants Ricardo to send out, knowing that more than just the evacuated Esperanza teams will pick up on the transmission. Ricardo’s voice will echo through half-a-dozen resistance radios across the continent, and his code will be relayed across oceans and through far-away hidden settlements: all of what is left of XCOM and all the people who resist the ADVENT Coalition will hear this message, and most of them will understand the reference coded into his single chosen word. 

The aliens can’t learn all of human history and culture in a mere fifteen years, not when they’re trying to erase humanity’s independent past. Relying on historical tales, old media, cultural touchstones, and ancient stories is still the quickest and easiest way for humanity to communicate in secret. There are different codes, of course, in different parts of the world — what works in China as a shared cultural shorthand doesn’t work quite so well in Africa or Europe or the Americas. But humanity is resilient and adaptive, and old hatreds and prejudices have fallen away under the harsh boot of alien rule. Messages are quick to be translated and relayed, from one culture to another.

So Bradford chooses his message with care, and gives Ricardo a single word to announce over the radio in the middle of a brief burst of chatter at midnight. 

It takes him time to decide. This is a victory, yes, but it has come at too great cost: they have lost arguably more than they could spare. Dr. Shen had been with XCOM even longer than Bradford, and the two engineers who had died at his side had been among his best and most intelligent aides. Chou and Kenbridge are gone, and Marquez is in limbo: that’s half of XCOM’s current combat strength outright gone, and Osei won’t be back up to full strength for almost a month. 

But for all it was a costly battle, they did win, and sometimes a key battle is all it takes to begin winning a war. They’ve stormed their beach, and begun their assault: this supply ship gives them a foothold they’ve never had before, a base that can move to avoid ADVENT’s searches and which can bring the fight to the aliens themselves. This is their turning point, as undeveloped as it is at the moment, and Bradford intends the world to know it.

Still, he hesitates over his choice, and finally goes his with gut feeling. “Kansas,” he tells Ricardo brusquely, knowing it will be heard by people the world over in different variations. But here in America, books and movies and old quotes from Oz will echo behind the name of his home state, and Kansas carries more meaning than just a state’s name from the weight of Dorothy’s long-ago words. “Kansas,” he says, and there’s an obvious message behind that: there’s no place like home. 

Kansas will recall the evacuees back to Esperanza, but it will likely gather in more recruits. It’s a call to arms as much as it is reassurance that Esperanza is safe to return to: there’s no place like home, and Earth is the only home they have, and that home is worth fighting for. Bradford stands quietly in the corner of the radio room as Ricardo quickly speaks the code into the radio, a quick burst of chatter and conversation with the code embedded into the middle of it in a strategic position. Ricardo repeats his message three times, first in Spanish, then English, then French, then in something he thinks might be Korean, where Kansas sounds different and oddly obvious against in a foreign language. There’s a long burst of low static afterward, and then, very faintly, Bradford hears the message repeated again, and again, different voices picking up the code and passing it along the channels. 

The relay is active, and word is spreading: only then does Bradford wearily trudge into the little shack of a bunkhouse where Osei and Kelly sit alone in the dark waiting for him. 

The small room feels spacious with only the three of them in it. They each take a seat on a footlocker, and the room echoes with the names of those missing. 

The tequila is lukewarm, not particularly good, and it’s Bradford’s least favorite type of alcohol in any case. He still takes the first drink without flinching, and passes the square bottle to Kelly afterward. She takes her own swig with a grimace, and helps Osei hold the bottle with his injured arm for his own turn.

They drink in silence, three drinks each for the three dead and injured men they’re missing, and Bradford pours out what’s left of the tepid liquor into the sand outside the shack when they’re done. There’s not much else they can do for the dead, and the liquor numbs the edges of what should be a victory but what still tastes too much like defeat.

They spend the next day honoring the dead in other ways, returning to the supply ship to clean out the alien bodies and offer what last bits of respect they can to the bodies of their comrades. They use old sheets as shrouds, tying the five bodies of the fallen into the fabric in preparation for their burials. Sheer practicality of hot summer sun means they have to bury their dead quickly, before the evacuated personnel return to Esperanza. They bury Dr. Shen and the other deceased in a clearing at the bottom of the canyon, barely a tenth of a mile from the alien craft where they died. The five of them still in good shape — Bradford, Kelly, Rishi, Ricardo, and Johan — take turns with the shovels to dig a deep enough grave. Bradford coordinates things as they lower the shrouded bodies into the ground as gently as possible, and they cover the shared grave together, shovelful by shovelful, until their dead are buried in the quiet shade of the canyon floor. Osei, with his one good hand, sits in the radio tower and keeps watch while they labor in the canyon below, and he’s the one to notify them a day later that the first convoy is returning earlier than expected.

Bradford is the one to take on the duty of sitting down with Shen’s daughter when the noncombatants return from the safe houses. Lily cries into his jacket, heartbroken, and Bradford doesn’t know what comfort he can offer her besides that shoulder to cry on. She doesn’t meet his eyes afterward, embarrassed and broken and empty, and Bradford awkwardly pats at her back and wishes silently that everything had ended differently. She’s quiet for the rest of the day, pale and determined. But when he suggests she might want to take some time to herself and not join the others when they head down into the canyon to start work on mapping the supply ship’s systems, she brushes him off.

“Dad got me a ship,” she says. “I’m going to figure out how it works.”

On the day after XCOM returns to Esperanza, there’s a gathering at the grave site. There isn’t a service, really, but everyone leaves projects and research behind to come together to honor the dead. No words are said, and they work in silence to create a monument to mark the spot. The only marker they can manage for the grave is a pile of rocks; it takes them a bare half hour to accumulate enough from the surrounding desert to create a waist-high pile. Lily tops it with a tall stick, turning it into a flagpole by tying a streamer of ragged cloth to the top of it – part of the old XCOM flag that had hung in the engineering barn, Bradford recognizes, and he works past the lump in his throat to help keep the makeshift flagpole steady against the desert wind.

“So,” Lily asks as they return to the vessel afterward. She comes to a stop beside Bradford as the rest of XCOM makes their way into the vessel, and she looks up at the ship with red-rimmed eyes that are steely in their determination. “What are we going to call it?”

Bradford’s shoulders are sore from digging, and his hands are scraped raw from pulling stones out of place along the canyon walls to move them to the memorial. Grave digging is not his favorite task, but there’s something honest about the work, and the resulting ache in his shoulders is one last way to respect Shen’s memory, a last gift of gratitude to a man who’d given XCOM so much. 

“The Avenger,” he says, looking up at the ship’s nose, and no one argues.


	6. 02-01: Acquiring Information

# Acquisitions

## Section 2: Winning the Sky

### Chapter 1: Acquiring Information

The call comes through shortly after midnight. 

“Central?” Lily Shen asks over the in-room paging system. It’s hard to tell, considering the poor sound quality, but she sounds worried. “You wanted me to check in with you if anything came through that looked odd.”

“Go ahead, Shen,” Bradford tells her wearily, staring at the ceiling over his bed. He’s got the beginnings of a headache from the whiskey he’d overindulged in earlier in the night, but there’s nothing he can do to stop that now. The drink had been a bad idea, but he hadn’t been able to help himself – Vahlen’s been missing for six months now, and they’ve lost three agents in the past twelve days. News that Charles Easley had been caught and killed three days prior had only reached him six hours ago. It isn’t easy, to sit in his room alone facing so many dismal reports. The whiskey had at least numbed the dull pain of failure.

Now, though, as Shen hesitantly offers her brief summary, Bradford scrubs at his face, trying to reduce that numbness so he can think. “We’ve got a call coming in off of the transfer tower in Sector Eight,” she says. “I don’t recognize the signal, but it’s flagged as high priority and it’s definitely encrypted.”

Bradford sits up and reaches for his boots. He’s still wearing his duty uniform. At least, it’s what he considers his duty uniform, the tough cargo pants and knit shirt he practically lives in these days. It’s not as though XCOM has any kind of official uniform code — there isn’t the funding for it, for one, and they’re hardly a entirely a military organization anymore, and as an underground resistance movement it’d be fairly foolish to insist on official uniforms and ranks. But he had been career military even before XCOM, and old habits die hard: Bradford is still most comfortable in a uniform, no matter how unofficial it is. 

He isn’t exactly thrilled to sleep in his clothes so often, but he’s long since accepted it as a hazard of his job. It’s been a rough six months, and he’s learned that sleeping in his clothes lets him roll out of bed to deal with things without having to stop and put himself together first. It at least gives him a certain amount of dignity, too, during whatever midnight disaster inevitably drags him from his bed: he can’t count the number of times his senior team has assembled in the middle of the night due to some unforeseen issue, and he knows far more than he’d like to about most of his team’s preferred sleep clothes — or lack thereof — because of it. Most of them too now sleep in some version of their regular duty gear. At least until the Avenger’s systems are completely mapped, it’s simply easier to assume something will drag them out of bed and be prepared for that inevitability than be embarrassed by showing up to the disaster half-clad only in pajamas.

“What security protocols is the call using?” he asks Shen now, jamming his feet into his boots.

“None,” Shen answers apprehensively. 

His hands pause on his bootlaces, and then yank them tight. “I’ll take it up in the media room,” he says. “Give me five minutes. And wake up Marquez, just in case – tell him I want him to take some of the new team out and set up a perimeter. I want some extra eyes out there.”

“Copy that, Central,” Shen replies, sounding relieved, and she signs off. She’s still new at managing all the Avenger’s communications, and Bradford concedes that this is an unusual case; he doesn’t blame her for waking him. Still, as he stomps his feet into his boots, he wonders at the encrypted message.

Vahlen? He’s been hoping to get some word from her for half a year now. Wherever she’s disappeared to, if she’s alive, Bradford doesn’t doubt that she’d find a way to get a message off. But Vahlen knows the security protocols, even if they’ve changed since her vanishing act, and Shen’s been keeping an eye out specifically for expired protocols on the off chance that Vahlen reaches out to them. 

He buckles his belt on with absent, habitual motions, checking the pistol at his thigh and cinching it into place. He shrugs into his shoulder harness as he leaves his quarters — his room is small and cramped, more closet than bedroom, but it’s at least private. The benefit, he thinks wryly, of being in command: his team had all but begged him to move out of the larger room they’d converted into a barracks after one too many midnight calls requiring his attention woke the whole room. There are two other private rooms tucked away into this little corner of Deck 6; Shen commandeered one of them from the beginning, and the other’s only recently become occupied. Bradford appreciates the quiet, though, and the separation from the rest of XCOM’s personnel. It makes it easier to be able to spread reports out over a flat surface without worrying about who else might look over his shoulder to see them, and it means fewer people are around to notice how little sleep he’s been getting.

Bradford flips through the other possibilities for the encrypted call in his mind as he makes his way through the half-cleared corridors of Deck 6. The problem, he thinks as he eschews the chancy lift in favor of the ladder up to Deck 7, is that XCOM is still too small for there to be many options. Most of XCOM’s noncombatants are here, aboard the Avenger or camped up at Esperanza on top of the canyon – the scientists and engineers and black marketeers that keep XCOM moving forward have all begun to gather around the Avenger, where everything is centered. Most of the combatants are at the Avenger, too. Marquez is a decent drill sergeant even if his body is now too broken for sustained combat, and he’s good at beating rookies into some semblance of shape; he almost always has one or two new recruits training with him for future deployments. But even those volunteers brave enough to actually pick up a gun and fight are few in number. There are even less of them who are trained to the point where Bradford feels secure in sending them out on missions undercover in the ADVENT-controlled city centers, or to act as a voice for XCOM in one of the many small defiant settlements trying to operate off the alien’s persistently invasive grid. XCOM’s entire personnel staff, Bradford guesses, aboard the Avenger and in Esperanza and operating somewhere else out in the world, would be less than a hundred people.

And of those hundred, there are less than a dozen or so who operate off the regular communications grid. Which means, he recognizes with no small amount of worry, there are very few people who might even be in the position to send in an encrypted message without using Shen’s custom-built security protocols. Bradford ticks off his mental list as he turns down the corridor toward the media room. 

Denmother is off in Russia at the moment, setting up a resistance settlement somewhere in the Siberian corridor – she’d get in contact through more usual ways unless something went horrifically wrong. He’s coordinating agents in four different city centers and three remote settlements at the moment, but they’re all scheduled for their regular check-ins over the next two days, and all of them know the current security codes. Jane Kelly, last he heard, was still somewhere in Europe attempting to track Vahlen down. She’d sent in a coded message sixteen hours earlier informing him that her leads were running out and she hadn’t made any progress, so he doubts this midnight message has come from her. Besides, when her operations go wrong, she has the disconcerting habit of simply showing back up at the Avenger after a week of radio silence rather than calling in for extraction: for all she’s learned to work within XCOM’s framework of rules and required check-ins, she’s still more used to relying on herself.

There are half-a-dozen other people it could be – material providers and resistance settlements who are sworn to XCOM’s cause and who have radios with range enough to bounce an encrypted message out to them – but the lack of security protocols is mildly alarming at best, disastrous at worst. This will not, Bradford thinks, be a pleasant call with good news, whoever it comes from.

The media room is oddly shaped, mostly oval but for a few strange bulges. But it’s one of the few spaces on the Avenger they’ve cleared of alien debris completely, so it has become into their briefing room more out of default than out of any real intent. He has no idea what the aliens used the room for, but XCOM has added a table and what had probably once been two circular benches from some restaurant booth to the center of it, and uses it as a place for meetings and mission briefs. Now, though, Bradford powers on the display hung on the wall, and toggles the room’s voice connection. 

“Ready when you are, Shen,” he says, bracing himself for what will surely be a stressful conversation. He runs a hand over his face to try to prepare himself for bad news, wishing again he hadn’t indulged in the whiskey earlier. He feels stubble under his fingers, and can’t remember when he last shaved.

“Roger that, Central,” Shen says, all professional calm. “Patching it through.”

She’s a good engineer; he’ll give her that. For all her youth, she understands the Avenger’s systems like a true-born chief engineer. The Avenger is hers in a way the others can’t quite share, and she sometimes seems to be the only one who can look at the alien technology humming all around them and translate it into a semblance of order and function. Bradford had been the one to start calling her simply “Shen”, and he’d meant it as a compliment: it’s what he’d called her father, and he fully trusts her to step into her father’s shoes and handle all XCOM’s engineering issues. Now she easily merges XCOM’s human technology with the alien circuitry of the Avenger to send the incoming message to Bradford in the media room.

The screen resolves into static, and then as Bradford turns to face it, the static clears abruptly into a scene he in no way expected.

“Hello, Central,” a low voice greets him, and Bradford stares up in shock at two bright lights and the shadowed, hidden form of the former Council’s spokesman silhouetted in front of them. “It’s been… quite some time.”

Their conversation is short and direct. Bradford does not ask all the questions he has, mostly because that would take hours. Instead, the Spokesman – an anonymous man he considered long-dead at best, a living traitor at worst – confirms his identity and his loyalty in a few forceful words, and offers Bradford what he promises is the first of more information to come.

Barely ten minutes of discussion later, the call disconnects and Bradford finds himself staring at his battered reflection in the empty black display.

“Shen,” he says without moving, and her voice responds back instantly.

“Trouble?” she asks warily, static crackling through her voice as it echoes from the speakers mounted in the ceiling. 

He actually smiles, though no one can see him. It’s strange to see himself smile, as he watches his reflection in the powered-off display in front of him. It’s been a long while since he’s had anything to smile about.

“Not this time,” he says, and doesn’t bother to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. “Set up a meeting tomorrow morning, eleven hundred. I’ll want you, that new head scientist, Marquez, and Santiago. And if any of our agents report in before then, tell them to stand by unless it’s an emergency – I think we just got given a game-changer.”

“Who was it, Central?” Shen asks, and he values that she’s honest enough not to eavesdrop in on the messages she transfers.

“An old friend,” he tells her, and strides from the room. “You’ll hear the whole story tomorrow – I’ve got work to do now.”

He spends the rest of the small hours of the morning making plans and sobering up. By eleven hundred, he’s presentable and organized enough that no one summoned for the meeting comments on the bruises under his eyes or the four-day stubble he’s sporting. He lays out a brief history of the Spokesman’s connection to XCOM. It’s easier than he expected to convince his senior team of his absolute trust in the double agent, but the Spokesman’s record with the old XCOM speaks for itself. His years of silence are perhaps less easy to justify, but it is Santiago who points out that until recently, XCOM had been so solidly underground that the Spokesman might be forgiven for assuming it dead. 

Bradford agrees: it’s disquieting, on the one hand, to learn that XCOM’s recent success in gathering recruits and information and supplies has led to ADVENT’s attention. But on the other hand, because ADVENT has begun investigating them once more, knowledge of their existence had spread wide enough to come to the Spokesman’s notice. Gaining an ally as powerful as the Spokesman — who, from all indications, is now highly-placed within ADVENT’s puppet human government — is worth the increased scrutiny from ADVENT. 

Then Bradford provides the information he’d been given to the rest of XCOM’s senior leadership team: the Speaker, ADVENT’s official voice, the face of the alien-controlled propaganda machine assimilating the world, will be traveling away from his usual base in Asia to address crowds at the completion of a monument in a city center nearby. The Speaker travels fairly frequently, so that’s not as important as the Spokesman’s real bit of news: the Speaker’s personal transport, a military-grade Skyranger specifically modified to transport ADVENT’s elites, will be landing not at ADVENT’s military compound outside the city center, but inside the urban area itself in a private hangar. The Speaker’s Skyranger, it seems, needs a bit of a repair, and a private company is under contract to house the Skyranger off-site and see to the repairs while the Speaker is in town.

Private hangars, of course, are much easier to infiltrate than ADVENT military bases, and Bradford has been scheming on how to get his hands on some kind of short-range transport for XCOM for years. The Avenger is a base, obviously: but a smaller transport would give them a way to insert and recover ground teams swiftly and safely.

“A VIP-modified Skyranger,” Shen sighs longingly. “We could do so much with that.”

“The Spokesman estimates we have three months to get ourselves into place before it’s due to arrive,” Bradford continues. “So there’s our window of opportunity to acquire it, if we’re careful.”

“It will need planning,” Santiago says thoughtfully. “Undercover would be best. A small team, a perilous assignment. Two operatives.” The swarthy man nods. “I can find paperwork for two,” he announces in his heavily accented English. “Three, maybe. But two I can do, solid. Yes.”

Bradford had come to that conclusion in the hours he’d spent planning. “I’ll be one of them,” he says. “I can pilot the damn thing, at least, and I don’t know of anyone else who can.” It’s been years since he’s piloted anything, of course, and there’s a reason he never bothered continuing his pilot training. But they don’t have a better option — they haven’t been able to recruit a real pilot in more than a decade. And for a military-grade Skyranger, he’ll deal with his dislike of undercover assignments.

Santiago is obviously choosing his words carefully, his narrow face screwed up in an effort not to offend him. “You are not so suited for undercover, Central,” he says at last, though he doesn’t dispute the necessity of having even a poor a pilot on the mission. “I think for your second you should have someone who is better.”

Richard Tygan, the somber new chief scientist, thoughtfully examines the map the Spokesman provided. “This city center,” he says, his words precise and almost apologetic, “I am somewhat familiar with it. There are several neighborhoods near the Skyranger’s position which might make ideal staging areas.” He touches the map, highlighting a few points. “Where you will want to stay will, of course, depend on what Mr. Santiago can come up with as far as identification goes.”

Santiago gives a very toothy grin, the one that makes Bradford very glad the skinny man works for them and not against them. “I get at least one very good,” he says, full of pride in his ability as XCOM’s chief requisition officer. “One maybe only good.”

“Jane Kelly,” Marquez says out of nowhere, and heads turn to regard him. The large soldier shifts uncomfortably in his seat at the attention – he is not a leader, no matter how much Bradford tries to encourage him to speak up more in these meetings. Marquez is comfortable with new recruits, with playing the part of the drill sergeant, but he’s less comfortable in these tactical planning sessions, and he’s not turning into the voice for the soldiers that Bradford had wanted him to become. But he offers his suggestion now despite his obvious unease at being the focus of the group’s gaze. “She’s one of our best operatives for undercover, right? She’s worked with you before,” he reminds Bradford, “with that ADVENT gene therapy thing. And she can handle herself all right if it all goes to hell.”

“I thought she was out looking for Vahlen,” Shen recalls with a hopeful tilt of her head.

“But not having any luck,” Bradford acknowledges thoughtfully. “Shen, do you think you could get a message to her before her next check-in?”

The young woman looks mildly offended. “Sure,” is all she says, though Bradford’s fairly sure she’s itching to defend her communications array from the implied insult to its power.

“Good.” Bradford weighs his options and makes the final call. “Kelly and I will be the forward team. I want us to be in place as soon as possible – as soon as she can get pulled in from wherever she is. We’ll make final preparations in the field. Marquez, you’ll be in charge of Avenger security while I’m gone – I want those new rookies trained up, and I want you to keep that perimeter secure. Do a check-in up with Esperanza every other day. Shen, keep working on those systems, especially that landing ramp issue – I’ll leave all the engineering projects in your hands. And Dr. Tygan…”

The newest member of his team smiles faintly at him, brown eyes almost amused behind his glasses. “I will continue settling in to my new lab, Central,” he says politely, lacing his fingers together with a show of calm. “There are a great many things that I will need to prepare in order to continue my research here, and still several people to meet.”

Shen makes a quiet and only somewhat stifled noise of annoyance, and though Bradford glances at her with narrowed eyes, he doesn’t say anything to her. Instead, he turns to Santiago. “Just let us know when you have the documentation ready,” he says.

“Six days, maybe seven,” he warns. Santiago gives a little bow from where he sits. “One very good,” he repeats. “One only good, I think. Kelly, she is good. And good to work with. It will work.”

And with that, the meeting ends. Marquez is first to leave, eager to escape what he still calls “officer duty” with the derision of the grunt he still claims to be. Santiago gives Bradford one long, thoughtful look as he exits the room, and Tygan follows in his wake, the black man’s back straight and the scarring at the base of his neck still angry and red against his skin.

Bradford spends the next few minutes lecturing Shen on the necessity of being cordial with Dr. Tygan – the man is nothing but polite and willing to help, and he dug an ADVENT chip out of his own head when he defected, for God’s sake – but he thinks he succeeds only in impressing upon the young woman the need to remain vigilant. Shen is as stubborn as her father, Bradford recognizes, still a little unsure how hard he can lean on her. He’s not used to working with her yet, and she’s still awkward around him, in the way young officers are nervous about working with the more established brass. It amuses him, when it doesn’t leave him feeling older than he already is. Another year, he thinks almost affectionately, and Shen will be too used to him to worry about offending him; as it is, she’s the only one who seems to worry over the fact that she’s the youngest and least experienced member of the senior staff, and Bradford doesn’t want to come down too hard on her because of that. She needs to be built up, not pushed down, and because of that, he doesn’t press her too much about being more polite with Tygan.

He spends most of the next few days readying himself to leave the Avenger. Bradford hates undercover work, but for a Skyranger he’ll suck it up, pretend to be someone he’s not, and live in an ADVENT-controlled city center for a few months. It’s been more than a decade since he’s flown anything, though, and even then, his piloting skill had been barely adequate for emergency situations. He’s never been a skilled pilot, and it’s been more almost thirty years since he qualified to pilot anything even vaguely resembling a Skyranger. He’s just barely better than having no pilot at all, and very willing to admit it, but it’ll take time they don’t have to recruit a better pilot. 

Shen finds him manuals, and he sifts through old flight logs and navigation data to help refresh his memory. The Skyranger will be as much human technology as alien, and Shen patiently walks him through what to expect and how to handle the new systems, using the Avenger’s dead piloting station as a simulator for him to acquire the muscle memory of how to handle pitch and acceleration. Just about the only thing going in Bradford’s favor is that he’s not an idiot, and that he picks up the basics quickly enough. In the early years, just after XCOM had fallen — seventeen years ago now — he’d been pressed into service as a pilot for evacuation transports more often than not, and he’s familiar enough with the alien-human hybrid ships that he knows he won’t embarrass himself completely attempting to keep one in the air.

He’s still not looking forward to the task, but he’s at least relatively certain he won’t plow the Skyranger through a skyscraper or into the ground when he attempts a landing. He’s well aware that’s not much of a recommendation, and he spends long hours with Marquez sorting through dossiers and intelligence trying to find a better pilot that they might be able to tug into place in time for a real extraction. There aren’t many pilots that haven’t been absorbed by ADVENT these days, though, and it’s largely an exercise in futility — they pick out the only two they can find, and Bradford dispatches two different operatives to attempt to make contact and recruit them into XCOM’s fold even though he doesn’t have great hopes for success.

Santiago spends the better part of a week away from the Avenger, moving through a city center down near where Mexico City once sprawled, and he returns with a persistent cough and a tight smile. He sits down with Bradford in the media room. “This for Kelly,” he says, setting a plain envelope all but bulging at the seams down on the table. He pats it, satisfied with the contents. “And this for you,” he adds, giving Bradford his own envelope. He gives Bradford a broad, very pleased grin that has the unfortunate side effect of making him look rather diabolical. “Is very good.”

Bradford scans through his new identity: Brian Smith, and the last name almost makes him laugh because it’s so trite. But even a brief glance at the paperwork behind the first identification card wipes any trace of amusement off of his face.

“EXALT?” he asks in utter disbelief. He looks up at Santiago in disgust. “You made me EXALT?”

Santiago’s smile is sharp. “You are too obviously soldier,” he says, and he taps his own unmarred cheek. Bradford frowns, and feels the scar across his own cheek pull tight: he forgets he has it, sometimes, but Santiago raises a good point. “Too obvious to hide, so I put it in plain sight. EXALT soldiers are very good, very nice – veterans, full honors, special rights. Above suspicion, quick to be hired.” And he beams at Bradford. “Very good cover.”

“Very good cover,” Bradford repeats, stunned. And he weighs his discomfort at pretending to be what killed the old XCOM against the potential for acquiring a Skyranger to raise the fortunes of the new XCOM. It’s no contest. 

So he swallows down his instinctual revulsion. He picks up the packet and looks at his own face staring back at him from the new identity card. There was probably once a real Brian Smith, a real man who fought for EXALT and betrayed his world; what happened to him, Bradford doesn’t truly care to know. His identity, if nothing else, will be put to work for the right cause. 

Santiago is very good at what he does. Crafting these cover identities is no small task, but Santiago has perfected it into an art form. Brian Smith’s identity will be tied in to Bradford’s fingerprints, his biometrics, his health history: John Bradford will be grafted on to Brian Smith so seamlessly no one will notice the differences.

“Great,” he mutters, and prepares for a long three months.


	7. 02-02: Acquiring Covers

# Acquisitions

## Section 2: Winning the Sky

### Chapter 2: Acquiring Covers

Santiago is right, at least: Bradford is hired as a relief pilot by the target hangar within two weeks of beginning his cover. The interview is laughable, once he realizes that the meek men in suits are hiring him mostly for the falsified flight scores Santiago had included in his cover packet. Bradford can handle playing a quiet, somewhat surly war veteran, and he’s not sure if he’s insulted by or grateful for the fact that Santiago created a cover for him so close to his actual identity and personality.

It feels strange to slip back into the constant paranoia that comes with living in an ADVENT-controlled city center. He’s become spoiled by the Avenger and Esperanza, he thinks: before XCOM dared come together so obviously, he’d spent more than a decade living as unobtrusively as possible in various city centers. He still has some of those old instincts, but fewer of them apply for this mission than he expected: his cover status as an honored veteran means he’s living not in old housing blocks but in a glossy new building, and there’s no need for him to move every few weeks to keep anyone from tracking him down. Instead, he keeps a wary eye out on the surveillance cameras and drones that line every inch of his daily route to and from work, and does his best to keep himself neat and clean-shaven to better fit in with the perfection of his ADVENT-approved status.

He flies an average of six times a week – short day trips, shuttling contracted goods back and forth across the city center. He’s not as rusty as he feared in the cockpit, though he’s willing to admit that he’s very grateful for the amount of automation present in the shuttle controls. He spends his free time in the simulators to improve as quickly as he can, and is grimly pleased to determine that he ought to do just fine with the Skyranger when the time comes. No one seems brave enough to question why his actual performance doesn’t match the exemplary flight scores he’d been hired for, but there’s no real reason for any kind of tricky piloting in this job and so there’s little justification for the others to think his background is false. Thankfully his day trips are short and uncomplicated; he improves swiftly, and within a few weeks, doesn’t worry about living up to his impressive record as it’s incredibly unlikely any kind of fancy flying will be required on his daily runs. Still, he doesn’t go out of his way to make friends at the hangar: the other pilots greet him amiably enough, and the support personnel behind the office desks quickly come to view him as dependable and by-the-books, if rather antisocial.

He isn’t particularly surprised to find Kelly behind one of those desks two weeks after he’s brought on board as a relief pilot. She wears the practical jumpsuit of a maintenance supervisor, and does a decent job of stalking around the hangar checking up on repairs, preventative maintenance, and the general condition of the place. He hasn’t seen her in close to three months: her hair is longer than he remembers, and she’s pale from spending most of the winter in Scandinavian countries that don’t get much sun. She looks her age, he’s surprised to find, for the first time since he’s known her. Before, she might have been able to pass for thirty. Now she’s undeniably closing in on forty, and it lends her an air of quiet authority that she’d lacked before.

Kelly’s the one to arrange for their first official meeting, a carefully planned accidental bump in the hallway where she feigns astonishment, does a lot of talking about how she never expected to see anyone from her last job here, and gets him to agree to have lunch with her for old times’ sake in front of six maintenance workers and two very interested contractors. It was done remarkably well, Bradford thinks afterward, amused despite himself at how well she’d turned the careful choreography into something that had looked careless and genuine. 

Kelly has lived most of the past seventeen years undercover, playing some part or another to work toward harming ADVENT, and the more he watches her work, the more Bradford recognizes how paltry by comparison his own meager attempts at adapting to his cover are. He hides behind Brian Smith’s service record and surly reputation, and uses both as an excuse to avoid talking to everyone around him, coworkers and strangers alike. But Kelly is far more outgoing, and she’s able to lean into her own cover’s cheerful exterior to talk with everyone, lying her way through chats with her supervisors and gossip with her coworkers with equal ease and comfort. She’s learning more than he ever will, he thinks ruefully, and that’s the reason he picked her as his partner for this mission: she’ll keep her ear to the ground, and she’ll pick up any rumors of trouble that his more taciturn approach might miss.

It is both impressive and amusing to watch her work, and to realize that she’s turning her cover’s charm onto him to give them an excuse to talk to each other in the hangar’s main office building. Ann Locke is vivacious and friendly, and all too glad to see a former coworker; he lets her eat lunch with him when he’s in the office between shuttle runs, and is almost baffled at how Kelly can slip little bits of information innocuously into her conversation as they eat to tell him that she’s got a decent apartment eight tram stops away and how her search for Vahlen had run dry just about the time she’d been recalled for this mission. It takes him far longer to figure out how to casually tell her that Shen’s remotely installed a scrambler at his apartment so that he can check in with the Avenger as needed, and to reassure her that she hadn’t missed anything in the two weeks it had taken her to get herself hired after him. They start to test out various codes, brief words and phrases and gestures that sound and look like nothing more than basic conversation or habitual movements but which can convey messages they don’t dare state openly. They’ve worked together before, and already have a small lexicon of shorthand to work with, which makes it easy to slowly add more codes to their collection.

Within another two weeks, everyone at the hangar accepts the fact that the rather taciturn pilot Brian Smith occasionally shares his meals with the detail-oriented maintenance supervisor Ann Locke. He’s well aware that odds in the lunch room betting pool he’s not supposed to know about are four to one in favor of them dating within six months, though he does his best to simply ignore the sidelong glances and covert eavesdroppers attempting to keep tabs on them whenever they eat together.

It’s mildly frustrating, the tiniest bit embarrassing, and mostly very convenient. They trade coded messages during their few-times-a-week lunch dates in the hangar’s small employee lunch room, and when Shen passes along the Spokesman’s official information regarding the Speaker’s proposed visit, Bradford informs Kelly of the development by inviting her to his apartment for dinner in front of two other supervisors and a very amused flight officer.

The bets in the lunch room pay out, and a new one emerges with six to one odds in favor of a wedding by the next Unification Day, just under a year away. It would be amazingly mortifying if it didn’t mean so many of their coworkers wanted to win money: one of the only people betting against them is the much-hated second shift supervisor, and it’s as much out of spite for him as it is interest in seeing the romance progress that their coworkers go out of their way to give them space. No one wants to risk their investment by interrupting their time together, so Bradford and Kelly sit alone during most of the lunches they share, and if people watch them, it’s for secret signs of affection and not covert signs of insurrection. It makes it remarkably easy to pass codes back and forth, and on the off chance someone watching them does pick up that they’re perhaps referencing something they’re not stating outright, it’s assumed to be part of a covert courtship rather than actual warfare.

Kelly is a competent covert operative – more than competent, Bradford acknowledges. She’s used to working on her own, and because of that, she’s well aware that her life might depend on her paranoia and observational skills. She arrives at their first intelligence session at his apartment with a complete floor plan of the hangars, security codes to every door in the building, a full maintenance schedule for the next six months, and the entire personnel roster. There’s a reason, he thinks, that she’s the one he sent to ferret out Vahlen; there’s a reason she survived for over a decade on her own in Europe causing trouble before she met XCOM.

Still, for all her expertise in the field, he’s surprised to realize how little she knows about the original XCOM. He’s been a part of it for so long that he finds it almost incomprehensible how little she knows about the history of the organization she now fights for. She’s been close with Vahlen, but apparently the scientist had been reluctant to talk much about her time with XCOM. It leaves Kelly with very little understanding of what XCOM had been like originally, a decade and a half before she joined them, and at times, her ignorance is obvious.

“So what was so bad about EXALT?” Kelly wonders out of nowhere at the end of their first meeting in his apartment. She’s standing at the floor-to-ceiling window in his living room and looking out over the view of the city as he brings out the drinks he’d offered her as a nightcap before she had to leave to take the tram back to her own apartment. “They were only active for a year or two, at best, and ADVENT retired them all pretty quickly post-invasion.”

He drops two glasses down on the coffee table, and unscrews the cap of the bottle of vodka he’d acquired from the shop two blocks away. He’d prefer whiskey, but the vodka had been cheaper; besides, he’s trying not to drink so much, and he’s less inclined to break into the vodka on his own than he would be if he’d brought the whiskey home instead. “What do you mean, what was so bad about them?” Bradford asks incredulously, offended merely by the question. “They were traitors. They were humans who helped the aliens prepare for the invasion. They fought against XCOM and helped take it down. They were people who didn’t care they were handing over our world to aliens to conquer.”

“ADVENT is the same thing — well, mostly — and you don’t hate them the same way,” she points out. Kelly gives him a measuring glance from where she stands at the window. “I mean, you weren’t this angry about your cover when Santiago set us up as ex-ADVENT agents last year when we needed to get access to those gene therapy records.”

He’s surprised she remembers his annoyance with that mission — the first mission they’d worked together undercover — and impressed that she noticed the difference in his mood in the first place. It makes him consider her point. 

“ADVENT is a result of propaganda,” he says eventually, remembering that earlier assignment and pouring the vodka liberally into each of their glasses. He tries come up with a way to explain what he means, and struggles to phrase it correctly. Because she’s consistently competent, he sometimes forgets that she’s so much younger than him. Bradford was thirty-five when the world ended, when the first XCOM crumbled and the aliens took control. While he won’t argue that she clearly suffered in the aftermath of the invasion, Kelly had been only twenty-one. They’re both old enough now that he doesn’t often think of the difference in their ages, but at times like this, he’s rather forcibly reminded of the divide his extra fourteen years puts between them.

“You don’t really have a chance against ADVENT these days – it’s everywhere, and it’s expected. You don’t have to make a choice, really, to become ADVENT. You grow up with the propaganda, so of course you’re ADVENT. EXALT, in the beginning…” He hesitates, trying verbalize the difference, and settles on telling her, “They were traitors by choice, all on their own. There were rumors that they were soldiers who went over to the aliens early, who wanted to cause trouble or get in on whatever new technology the aliens had. By the end…” He grimaces, takes a stiff drink from his glass, and sloshes more vodka into it to make up the difference. “By the time they were officially working with aliens to take down XCOM, we were hearing rumors that they weren’t even really all the way human anymore – the first gene mod experiments, splicing human and alien DNA.”

Kelly leaves the window and the view to pick up her own glass of the cheap liquor, and rubs it between her hands. “I’ve heard rumors they’re doing that to ADVENT troopers these days,” she admits, and gives a little shiver. “It’s… worrisome.”

“Creepy,” Bradford corrects. “Wrong.”

“Yeah.” She shakes her head, takes a sip of her drink. “Still. You don’t like EXALT.”

EXALT, Bradford thinks with bitter hatred, were who he saw dragging the Commander’s body from the ruins of XCOM’s base seventeen years ago. They were traitors and alien sympathizers, and because of them and their infiltration into the Council and XCOM itself, XCOM lost before it really had the chance to begin.

“No,” he agrees rather flatly. “I don’t.”

She shifts on her feet, and takes a seat on the couch behind the coffee table. She’s ostensibly here to go over their plans for the next month, though they’ve basically finished going over the reports they needed to study. The Spokesman’s intelligence has the Speaker – and more importantly, his specially modified military-grade VIP Skyranger – visiting their city center in mere weeks to celebrate progress made reorganizing the slums. He’ll head the formal celebration by dedicating some monstrosity of a statue, though Bradford’s not sure what that has to do with bulldozing the ghettos. But it means that according to the Spokesman’s intelligence, he’ll land his Skyranger at the hangar they both work undercover at now for some mild repair work while he’s busy making speeches. It will be their job to liberate it while the Speaker is busy. Organizing just how they’ll accomplish that will take effort. 

But instead of discussing their planned heist, “There’s a romance novel series about EXALT officers, you know,” Kelly says out of nowhere.

It’s random enough statement that Bradford gapes down at her where she sits on his couch. “A what?” he asks.

“A romance novel series,” she repeats, and there’s a smile twitching at the edges of her lips. “It’s six or seven books long and still going, all about EXALT officers fighting against XCOM in the early days of the arrival. You know, prepare for alien arrival, shut down the terrorists, oust corrupt self-serving politicians too afraid of change to collaborate, save the Elders, win the girl. She’s always some beautiful scientist’s daughter or someone kidnapped by XCOM for nefarious purposes or something like that.”

“Tell me you’re kidding,” Bradford manages in sheer disbelief. 

“Wish I was,” Kelly says cheerfully, obviously enjoying his stunned reaction. Her eyes are dancing. “It’s very popular – best-seller lists all across the globe, praise from ADVENT, official endorsements from various organizations. The Speaker mentioned the series as an example of how human culture has benefited since the Elders arrived in his last Unification Day speech. There’s talk of movie scripts.”

“What bullshit.” He shakes his head, inordinately angry that the worst months of his life are being glorified into enemy propaganda. Through _romance novels_ , of all things. “How the hell do you know about this?”

She laughs. “I’ve been living undercover for years, Central,” she reminds him. “You can’t avoid this kind of stuff. But,” and her voice turns suddenly serious, though her eyes are still bright with humor, “there is something about it that you probably should pay attention to, which is why I brought it up.”

“By all means,” he invites sarcastically. “Tell me how romance novels could be important to this mission.”

“Well,” she says mildly, refusing to take offense at his tone, “your neighbor across the hall writes them, for one.”

That’s so far from what he expected that Bradford simply stares at her. “What?”

“Your neighbor across the hall – Rachel Nettles? – she’s the series author. Well, she writes under a pen name, but yeah, it’s her.” She regards him seriously. “I investigated everyone on the floor, just to be careful, and she’s the only one that popped up anything interesting. This is a good building, you know – lots of ADVENT VIPs live here.”

Bradford stares at her. Marquez had called her one of their best undercover operatives, and Bradford decides now that he won’t contest that description ever again. He considers himself decently paranoid, but he hadn’t thought to investigate his own neighbors with that much depth, much less his partner’s neighbors: that she’d taken the extra step and he hadn’t makes him feel sloppy, and only drives the point home that she’s better at living undercover than he is. His supposed status as an EXALT veteran gained him access to a nice apartment block – extra security, ADVENT’s blessing for stronger network connections and a bigger draw against the power grid – which means that all his neighbors are likewise somehow in ADVENT’s favor. He’d done enough research to ensure that none of them were military, with no backgrounds that would identify or threaten him with recognition, but not anything beyond that.

“You’re telling me,” he says slowly, trying to cover what feels almost like embarrassment at being so quietly outplayed, “that Santiago set me up as an EXALT veteran and then put me right across the hallway from a lady who writes bad romance novels about EXALT veterans?”

“I’d let it be known you’re not interested very quickly if I were you,” Kelly tells him, and her brown eyes are still dancing with laughter. “Otherwise you might have a very persistent neighbor on your hands.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he says tiredly. He reaches back through his memories, calls up an image of a skinny middle-aged woman in white entering the apartment across the hall in the evening as he left for a night shift. He can’t remember ever talking with her in the month he’s been here.

Kelly shrugs, but her mouth is quirked up into a smile. “Just thought you’d want to know,” she points out. “It’s a decent cover, at least – if she writes about EXALT, she’ll probably idolize them and never suspect you.”

Bradford scrubs his hands across his face. “So let me make sure I’ve got this straight. My next door neighbor – “

“-across the hall neighbor,” his partner corrects.

“My across the hall neighbor,” he amends, “is some author famous for writing EXALT romance novels. And Santiago made me EXALT and put me right next to her.”

Kelly looks at him sympathetically, though there’s amusement in her tone as she sips at her vodka. “That’s the short of it,” she agrees.

Bradford considers the vodka in his glass, and then takes a long swallow. “I hate undercover work,” he grumbles once his throat is no longer burning. “Give me a gun and a target any day.”

Still, he’s grateful for the information, and shamed enough that she’d done a more thorough background check on his neighbors than he had that he spends his evening confirming her report. It’s a seven-book series, he sees in disgust, roughly one published a year for the past eight years, and reading the brief blurbs about the plots of each has him appalled. But the reviews of the novels are glowing, and praise has been heaped at the author’s feet along with official commendations and ADVENT approval; the author is clearly in ADVENT’s good graces. Bradford skims the first novel, very much against his will, if only to make sure there’s nothing overly incriminating in it. He reads just enough to reassure himself that the author doesn’t know anything actually true about the original XCOM — nothing that might hint that she’s done enough real research to be dangerous — and then deletes the novel off his tablet with a sense of complete revulsion.

The things he does for XCOM, he thinks bitterly, and breaks into the vodka on his own despite himself.

Still, it’s just as well Kelly brought it up to him, because three days later, he speaks with Rachel Nettles in the hallway for the first time. She’s entering her apartment just as he’s leaving his, and she smiles at him with amicable interest and is quick to strike up a polite introductory conversation.

Rachel Nettles is roughly his age — a little younger, he thinks, but closer to him than Kelly in age. She’s thin and beautiful the way middle-aged women who rely on surgery and cosmetics are beautiful: ruthlessly perfect and somehow obviously false. Still, it’s tastefully enough done, and she’s not trying to make herself look anything but respectable. Her pantsuit is snow-white and tailored in severe lines that do nothing to add any curves to her frame; her hair is blonde, trimmed neatly around her shoulders, and she brushes it back from her face with hands that boast prettily manicured nails. She’s polite enough as a neighbor, though, even if he finds her a little too inquisitive for his tastes. She says hello, introduces herself, invites him over for coffee, and mentions that she’s usually home during the day if he needs anything.

“I’m a writer,” she adds at the end of a friendly and pointless conversation that represents everything Bradford hates most about undercover assignments. “So I’m home at my keyboard most days.”

“I don’t read much,” Bradford says, hoping to shut her down, but if anything, that seems to make her pleased. He’s been just short of rude the whole conversation, hoping she would take the hint and stop bothering him, but she’s ignored his curtness in favor of making small talk with him.

“I wouldn’t expect you’d read my novels in any case,” she tells him as they stand in the hallway, and there’s a quirk of humor to her mouth that suggests she doesn’t take her work too seriously. “Though I wonder – I’m fond of military history, Mr. Smith, do you have any interest in that as well? You look like you’ve seen service with ADVENT.”

“EXALT,” he corrects gruffly, disliking the lie but devoted to staying in character. He locks the apartment door behind him, as if to remind her that he’s heading out to work and can’t simply stand around and chat. “And that was a long time ago. I prefer not to talk about it.”

It’s rude to leave her staring at him in the hallway, he thinks, but Brian Smith is a rude man, and Bradford takes refuge in it. He gives her a very brusque nod, and doesn’t bother to say goodbye to her. Instead, he turns his back on her and strides down the hallway to the elevator that will take him down to the main floor so that he can head out to the hangar for his day shift.

The elevator is swift to open, as it probably hadn’t needed to leave the floor after bringing Nettles up from the lobby. He steps into it, and has just the briefest glimpse down the hallway, where he sees Rachel Nettles standing in her doorway, arms crossed, watching him. At his glance, she drops her arms and steps into her apartment; her door shuts behind her just as the elevator doors slide closed in front of him.

Six more weeks, he thinks, and he shuts his eyes and rubs at his face to keep himself from groaning in sheer annoyance. And now that he’s met Nettles, he’ll have to acknowledge her again the next time he runs into her, and have more stupid polite conversations about nothing to keep her from growing too suspicious of him.

He hates undercover work.


	8. 02-03: Acquiring Distractions

# Acquisitions

## Section 2: Winning the Sky

### Chapter 3: Acquiring Distractions

For all his hate of undercover assignments, Bradford is honest enough to admit that this mission isn’t nearly as awful as he expected it to be. He’s done far worse work undercover than flying glorified air barges, and he’s had to stay in character with far more annoying covers than a surly EXALT veteran. 

Living in the city center makes the back of his shoulders itch, though, and he can’t escape the feeling that there are always unfriendly eyes on him. There are security cameras everywhere, from the hangar where he works to the public train he takes back to his apartment to the hallways leading to his front door. Every day is utterly monotonous and completely predictable. There are occasional moments of tension — a door jammed open to study power cables, computers hacked and schedules skimmed over to determine rotations, trespassing into a restricted zone to explore an unused back corridor, slipping Kelly a data stick unobtrusively as they eat together — but for the most part, this whole assignment has been little more than a tedious slog toward the actual theft of the Skyranger.

They arrived at the hangar without much in the way of a plan, but everything is slowly coalescing together. It will take a fair amount of preparation, timing, and decent luck, but the more Bradford studies the options, the more he’s satisfied with their working proposal. They start laying the groundwork for their heist, very delicately, and given their cover stories, it’s easy to meet up to pass along coded information.

As the weeks slide by, they begin to meet more and more outside of their lunch dates. Bradford finds him hosting their gatherings, more often than not: as an EXALT veteran, he’s entitled to a far better class of housing than Kelly’s cover allows as a mere maintenance supervisor. They meet twice at her cramped little studio apartment before they rather unilaterally decide his apartment will serve as their headquarters. It’s bigger, for one, but it’s also allowed a far larger draw against the power grid, which means the scramblers Shen’s sent with them undercover don’t attract nearly as much attention when they turn them on during their planning sessions. Those sessions begin to happen more and more frequently — once a week at first, and then twice, and then even more often than that as the Speaker’s visit draws ever closer.

But for all the mission is going well and no one seems to suspect them, it will only take one red flag for the whole assignment to come crashing down. No one in the hangar seems to suspect anything — Bradford, as fits his character, is taciturn and abrupt but generally decent; Kelly, as her own cover story demands, is cheerful and chattering and kind. Both of them are well-liked at work, and both of them perform their jobs admirably enough that no one suspects they don’t entirely have the skills they were hired for.

It only takes one false step, though, for everything to fail, and so despite the routine nature of things, that fear of discovery always lurks in the back of Bradford’s mind.

He’s in the kitchen looking for the bottle of gin he knows is somewhere in the top cabinet when the door chime peals. Kelly’s gotten into the habit of bringing over some kind of take-out when she shows up for their planning sessions, and in the interests of equality, he usually does his best to have some kind of drink on hand to contribute to the meeting.

He ignores the chime long enough to find the gin, and decides that the clear squat glasses stacked by the sink are clean enough to offer Kelly. At some point over the past two months, she's graduated from a guest and fellow field operative to something akin to a friend: someone who doesn't need pristine glasses or a clean apartment when she visits. Bradford hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the feeling of being that comfortable with someone until he found himself tolerating Kelly better than any of the other operatives he’s worked with before. It’s made the whole mission more bearable than he expected. He juggles the glasses in his left hand as he crosses the kitchen to dump them all on the coffee table they use for their sessions, and by the time he steps out of the kitchen he can hear the conversation going on outside his door from the small — and very illegal — monitoring device he’s had planted there for more than two months.

“-awfully strange, really.” His across-the-hall neighbor’s voice is smooth and curious; Bradford winces almost automatically. Then her words penetrate the annoyance her voice alone always causes, and he pauses out of paranoid habit to eavesdrop.

“I mean, you can’t possibly have that much in common,” Rachel Nettles continues, just loud enough to be heard through the monitoring device. “It’s just a little unusual, don’t you think, that you’re here so often.”

Kelly’s voice is quieter: she’s keeping her voice lower, trying to soothe whatever wild hair has gotten Nettles so speculative. Bradford, though, is taking no chances. He keeps a knife strapped to his boot when he’s home. He drops the gin and the glasses on the coffee table, and he bends to retrieve the knife. 

“We’re coworkers,” he hears Kelly saying, and listens as she runs through the whole cover story of their friendship at the hangar. Her voice is softer than Nettles’s, lower and quieter; she’s harder for him to hear through the monitoring device for all she’s closer to it. 

“I still think it’s a little suspicious,” Nettles says sharply in response to Kelly’s explanation. He can hear her getting even more worked up. Clearly, he thinks, her success as a writer comes from an overactive and over-dramatic imagination, as she’s been all but begging for details on him and his life ever since he admitted to serving with EXALT. Now it sounds like she’s starting in on Kelly. 

“You don’t visit someone every other day for weeks just because you’re coworkers. This is exactly what we’re told to watch out for, you know,” she continues, voice speculative. “Frequent meetings, pushy strangers, someone who’s taking interest in people who might know things about ADVENT or the Elders… This is trouble, and there’s no good reason for you to be here so often. I’m calling the neighborhood peacekeepers and reporting you for attempted coercion of a war veteran. If you’re innocent, you’ll have nothing to hide.”

Bradford winces: this is his fault, he thinks. Kelly’s a good operative, and he can’t blame her for this, not when he’s outright told Nettles that he’d prefer to live alone and undisturbed. He’d been trying to keep Nettles from chatting with him; instead, it seems to have backfired and now it’s putting suspicion squarely on Kelly’s shoulders. The threat of the peacekeepers is no minor problem, either — Bradford moves quickly.

He keeps a gun mounted behind the wall unit, and now Bradford crosses his apartment in four swift steps to pull it free. It’s just a pistol, tiny enough that it fits snugly into his hand, silenced and with a small magazine. He can take Nettles down in a shot or two, but they’ll have to make a break for it afterward. Other neighbors might not be observant enough to notice or care about Kelly’s frequent visits, but he doubts their apathy will extend to gunshots fired in the apartment hallway. Bradford curses, low and bitter, glancing around the apartment swiftly to mentally catalog what he’ll need to grab from the apartment and what will have to be left behind.

Kelly’s voice is louder, now, fearful and sharp. “No, please, I swear,” she begins, and she’s now loud enough that he can hear her through the door, not just the monitoring device. He’s almost certain she’s raising her voice so that he has some warning of what’s going on outside in case he hadn’t been paying attention before. “It’s not what you think,” Kelly adds, and she launches into what sounds like increasingly desperate excuses.

Bradford considers how much he’ll have to take from the apartment, weighs the pistol in his hand, and then tucks it behind him into the waistband of his pants. The knife will be better, he decides, moving to the door. Nettles isn’t a particularly fit woman; subduing her quickly with the knife will be less noisy and likely just as swift as the pistol. Definitely quieter, he thinks with a grimace, providing she doesn’t screech the walls down in the process. In the months he’s kept this apartment, she’s proved to be the only problem with it: she constantly harasses him with pleasantries in the hallways in an attempt to curry favor with him. It’s not the interest he feared, in his past or even in his current job, but it’s still interest, and far more frequent than he’s comfortable with: he dislikes being forced to interact with her, as polite as she is. Her conversation had become annoying very quickly, but never before had it become dangerous. Kelly’s constant presence has finally prodded her into action, he thinks, and he isn’t at all happy about the development.

The knife will buy him an extra ten minutes to strip the apartment, and a good head start against the alerts which are sure to go up as soon as someone notices what’s happened. With Kelly’s help, he’s fairly sure they can get to safety before any ADVENT response. Still, it'll be close, a race against time, and they’ll likely lose the chance to steal the Speaker’s Skyranger. The very real possibility that they've come so far only to be stopped by an excessively overprotective neighbor a mere month before everything is scheduled to play out has him gritting his teeth and preparing to strike. 

He presses against the wall besides the door, and carefully ghosts his palm over the ID monitor. A little square section of the door frosts over into transparency, a one-way window which allows him a glimpse of the hallway. The scene there is just as he expects: Nettles is standing in her doorway across the hall with her hands planted on her hips, glaring at Kelly, who is standing with her back to his door. Kelly’s wearing civilian clothes, as usual — dark pants and a plain jacket, and she’s carrying a thin plastic bag with the tell-tale imprints of take-out boxes straining against the sides. Nettles is peering at her suspiciously, dressed in her usual impeccable white slacks and blouse, her hair carefully coiffed high above her forehead and her long painted nails tapping against her slim hips.

“You’ve been coming over almost every other day,” Nettles says, and he can see the disapproval in her pointed face. “And Brian Smith has flat-out told me that he doesn’t like company and doesn’t want to be bothered. You have no good reason to be coming over so often to meet with him unless you’ve got an ulterior motive for bothering an EXALT veteran — coworkers, even friendly ones, don’t meet together so often. I bet you’re trying to get information out of Brian from his time with EXALT, just like those subversives the Speaker warned us about.”

Bradford inhales a tight breath, annoyed, mentally watching months of preparation disappear because of a nosy woman's overactive imagination and his insistence in sticking to his cover’s surly desire for avoiding others. He clenches his knife, and positions himself deliberately so that his right hand will be blocked by the wall when he opens the door. Nettles will scream like a banshee if she sees the knife, and it’s better to keep the element of surprise for as long as possible.

He takes another breath, and plans the next thirty seconds: he’ll open the door and move right. If Kelly’s smart, she’ll step aside out of his way. Nettles is rail-thin, and not too swift; he should be able to grab her arm, twist her around, and slit her throat within ten seconds. He's already planning to drag the body inside, but the arterial spray will be hard to miss; he’ll need Kelly’s help to pack everything vital, and they’ll need to leave immediately.

Kelly steps forward, though, dropping the bag of take-out food and ruining his clear path to the other woman. “No, please,” she says urgently, sounding near tears, and Bradford has to swallow back annoyance at her. She’s one of their best operatives; couldn’t she come up with something better, some excuse to keep Nettles at bay, anything at all to keep the mission alive instead of some desperate pleading?

“I’m calling the peacekeepers,” Nettles says with an air of finality, sounding more disappointed than aggressive. “You should be ashamed of yourself.” And she starts to turn away towards her open door and her communications terminal.

Bradford keys open the door with his left hand, knife hidden in his right hand, at the exact instant that Kelly steps forward.

“I’m in love with him!” Kelly blurts out just as he steps into the doorway. 

This statement has the advantage of shocking Nettles into a stunned halt, and the disadvantage of doing the same to Bradford.

Kelly turns at the noise of the door opening; behind her, Nettles stares with surprised eyes at Bradford’s sudden appearance. Kelly moves on unsteady legs to face him, her face pinched and pale. She’s not wearing her hat today, he thinks stupidly, and then his brain catches up and processes her expression. Her eyes flash at him, bright and desperate and annoyed, before she launches into rapid-fire speech.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and he can tell she’s scrambling to put together the right words. “I’m sorry, I know you’re not interested, I know you’re just being kind, I know you’re too old for me and that you don’t love me back, but I can’t help it — you’re just so amazing and you’re perfect and handsome and strong, and I’ve been in love with you for ages, since we worked together down south, and I didn’t want to make it awkward, really, but I just don’t know how to stop seeing you because you’re just — just amazing.”

It’s a long mess of babbled nonsense, but it gives Bradford time enough to catch on to her plan.

Nettles, behind her, is standing still, open-mouthed and amazed, manicured hands gripping the edge of her door frame as she stares at them in astonishment, and for once Bradford almost feels sympathy for her. Kelly finishes her plea, and looks up at him. From behind, Bradford imagines Nettles thinks she must look nervous or upset; from the front, looking down at her face, all Bradford can see is impatience.

 _Play along,_ he reads easily enough in the exasperated look she gives him. He very nearly rolls his eyes, and catches himself just in the nick of time. But he trusts Kelly, and in any case, he’s desperate. This will not be the worst he’s done to advance XCOM’s chances, and he’s willing to do far more than feign interest in a decently pretty operative before he’ll back away from the mission. Gaining a Skyranger will grant XCOM mobility and the ability to take advantage of more opportunities, and he won’t give that potential up now — not when they’ve come so close, not because he’s got a nosy neighbor with an overactive imagination enthralled by ADVENT’s propaganda, not when they’re just a month away from success. 

His right hand is still holding the knife, and it’s thankfully still behind the door frame, not visible to either woman in the hallway. He drops the knife, and covers up the little _thunk_ it makes as it hits the plush carpet of his apartment by stepping forward. 

“I love you too,” he says, and almost winces. The words feel flat and foreign in his mouth, and sound just as awful. He does his best to cover up his terrible acting by reached forward to kiss Kelly.

It’s been a long time since he’s embraced someone – even longer since he’s meant it to be affectionate, something other than a clap on the back or a supportive arm around someone’s shoulders. So when he reaches for her, it’s a little awkward, and a bit unpracticed: he jostles Kelly as he wraps his arms around her waist, and there’s a rough little bump as he rather gracelessly pulls her against him. She does her best to work with him, though, turning his fumbling into something unpolished rather than wooden. Her hands slip around his waist, where they pause just for a second as she discovers the gun tucked against the small of his back, and then her palms slide up his shirt, adjusting her balance as her personal space abruptly vanishes. 

It’s been a long time, too, since he’s kissed someone. He can’t remember the last time he was this sober for a kiss, either, which makes him feel more self-conscious than he expects as he tilts her face up to his for the kiss. Kelly is just small enough for it to be awkward: she’s a good deal shorter than him, and as her dry lips press against his, he finds that he has to bend lower to meet her lips. He angles his head to make it easier and hears Nettles say, “Oh.”

This close it’s hard to tell, but he’s pretty sure Kelly rolls her eyes at that. He doesn’t bother to hide his smile — he’s kissing her and apparently he’s in love with her, so a smile shouldn’t break cover too badly — and after another thirty seconds, Nettles says, “Oh,” again, sounding a bit impressed.

Kelly’s lips are soft under his, her body small and warm where it is pressed into him. Her breath flutters along his jaw as she breathes against his mouth. It’s a fairly chaste kiss, all things considered — for show and not for passion — so he’s surprised when her hands slide down his back and start tugging at his shirt where it’s tucked into his pants. She has it free with a few tugs, her slim hands slipping underneath the fabric. Her fingers are slender and cool against his skin, and it requires real effort not to startle as they brush across the small of his back. It takes him a long few seconds before he realizes that she’s pulled the tail of his shirt out so that she can tuck it over the pistol resting in his waistband, to disguise the gun from view. One of her hands rests on the pistol’s grip, pushing it steadily into the small of his back to keep it in place, and the other fists at the hem of his shirt, pulling the fabric down to hide the gun’s outline.

Bradford hauls in a breath and goes back to kissing her, hears a faint “Um,” come from Nettles’s general direction, and to speed things along in the manner Nettles seems to expect, he begins to slide his own hands up Kelly’s sides underneath her jacket as if he means to pull it off her.

Nettles very pointedly clears her throat, and Kelly breaks away from him with a fairly believable gasp and a flush of real color in her cheeks. Bradford keeps his arms around her waist, and feels her carefully balance her hand against his back and the pistol hidden there. He lifts his head to look at his neighbor, doing his best to play his part and look as realistically thrilled with the last two minutes as possible.

Nettles stands in her doorway, her green eyes wide and her too-smooth face bearing an expression equally shocked and pleased. “Well,” she says, obviously embarrassed. “I feel I owe you both an apology,” she continues, doing her best to look anywhere but directly at the two of them and completely failing. “I am sincerely sorry, and…” She seems to struggle with words. “Wish you all the best,” she finishes quickly, and steps back into her doorway. “Clearly a misunderstanding on my part.”

Kelly looks from Nettles back up at Bradford, and he meets her eyes. “Thank you,” he says, ostensibly to his neighbor. He continues to look down at Kelly, makes himself smile, and starts to move. He takes a deliberate step back and pulls Kelly with him, keeping her trapped in his arms as he moves backwards into his apartment. “Sorry to disturb you.”

“Have a good night,” Kelly echoes without looking back at Nettles, and Bradford bends his head down to kiss her again as they stumble back into his apartment. He fumbles for the door closure button without looking at the control panel, and the door slides shut as he kisses Kelly, cutting off the view of Nettles where she stands – still staring – across the hallway.

The instant the door is fully shut, Kelly pulls away from him. Her hand takes the pistol from his waistband as she goes, and she shoves it at him even as she darts toward the apartment’s wall unit. She’s cursing under her breath, low and heartfelt, and she very carefully does not look at him as she hurries to log herself into the secondary computer system.

Bradford finds himself relieved Kelly isn’t looking at him, and turns back to the door. He keys the privacy mode on, and then engages the viewscreen just in time to see Nettles disappearing back into her own apartment. “Of all the stupid reasons,” he grouses, and shuts off the viewscreen.

He steps across the apartment, tucking his shirt back into his waistband as he comes to stand behind Kelly. She’s frantically keying her way through the XCOM security feeds Shen had managed to hack into the building, and Bradford waits patiently as she works: she’s going faster than he would, and he won’t interfere to slow her down.

“Okay,” she says, on a breath of relief as the screen lights up. “Okay, she hasn’t gone for her communications unit. She’s powered up her terminal, but not her comms.”

“Peacekeepers?” Bradford asks, checking his pistol briefly and going back to retrieve his knife from where it rests on the floor by the door. He sets it back into the sheath attached to his boot, and glances around his small apartment. He’s still mentally preparing for evacuation — there’s a tablet hidden under the mattress, and encrypted files he’ll need are hidden on a data stick in the kitchen. Kelly is typing away at the console, and he can see the monitor flicker as she brute-forces her way into Nettles’s home network. He looks away to move to the couch, where a fake ID is hidden in the left arm of the uncomfortable sofa. “Is she calling the peacekeepers?” he asks again, more urgently. 

Kelly fiddles with the controls. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “No, she’s opening up some stuff at her terminal; let me see if I can — ah, sweet mother of God, really?” Her voice goes from worried to exasperated in half a second, her Irish accent suddenly and completely present as she swears, and she lets out a huff of air that is both relieved and mortified.

Bradford looks up from the couch’s arm to see her paused over the controls. He’s never quite seen that expression before on her face — fascinated and disgusted and amused and embarrassed all at once — and despite the oddity of it, he finds himself relaxing.

“Not the peacekeepers, I assume,” he says, and stops reaching for the fake ID slipped between the upholstery. 

“No,” she agrees, and she steps back from the wall unit, shaking her head. “Your esteemed meddling neighbor is currently opening up a new document on her terminal to begin detailing the story of her neighbor and his love life.” Kelly tilts her head, reads a few of the lines scrawling across the display, and then shakes her head. “It’s apparently a very interesting romance.”

“Well, damn.” Uneasily, Bradford rubs his hand across the back of his neck, and then sighs. He looks down at the pistol still in his right hand, and almost absently goes to put it back away in the wall unit where he keeps it securely hidden. “Better than the alternative, I suppose.”

“Sorry.” And Kelly sounds embarrassed; she looks away from the terminal to study the gin on the coffee table. He’s now sure it’s deliberate, the way she still hasn’t looked at him, but he can’t bring himself to call her out on avoiding him. “I couldn’t think of anything else that would work. Thanks for playing along.”

That her brain came up with this at all is vaguely surprising; that it worked so well is wholly unexpected. But Bradford finds that he doesn’t care so much now that the ploy was clearly successful. “It worked,” he says shortly, and clicks the safety back into place on the pistol. Reattaching it to the hidden mount behind the wall unit means that he doesn’t need to meet her eyes for another few minutes; it remains surprisingly difficult for him to do so. “What made you think of it?” he asks, fiddling with the release mechanism to reset the pistol.

She sighs, and leans back from the console. “Her novels,” Kelly admits. “I read a couple of them, just to get a feel for what they were like. She thinks you’re EXALT, and she writes all about EXALT, so I didn’t think she’d find it too far-fetched if I said I was in love with you. I figured she’d have a soft spot for something romantic.” As Bradford glances at her, she gestures at the wall terminal, still displaying a mirrored version of Nettles’s screen. “It looks like I was right. I really don’t think we need to worry about her calling ADVENT on us.” She shakes her head on another sigh, and still doesn't look at him. “And also — please don’t take this the wrong way — I could use a drink.”

He laughs before he can help it, a short bark of laughter that clearly surprises her into actually looking at him for the first time since they pulled apart. With the gun secured again, he turns to the low coffee table where the gin is sitting out. “You and me both,” he says, and unscrews the cap off the bottle. And, because he's curious, as he turns to get the tonic from the kitchen, he asks, “What was your plan if I hadn't opened the door right then?”

Kelly is smiling ruefully as she moves to sit beside the table. “Play on her sympathies — unrequited love, a hopeless romance, that kind of thing. If I could make her think that I wanted to keep it secret from you, she’d think she was in control, and people are always more lenient with you when they think they’re in charge. They’re not afraid of you if they can hold something over you. I figured she'd offer some sympathy, feel a little pity, and slink back inside her apartment muttering about the follies of love, maybe get an idea for her next novel.” Kelly's smile turns self-deprecating as she watches him make their drinks. “Not the best plan, granted, but all I could come up with under pressure.” 

Bradford is impressed despite himself, and feels almost guilty that he doubted her. He is ashamed, suddenly, that he figured she couldn’t handle the situation, and that his instant response of violence rather than distraction would have potentially wrecked the whole operation. Because of that uneasy shame, he moves away to add ice to their glasses before stepping back toward the couch. “And she’s just writing now?”

Kelly glances at the terminal, where words appear in jerky bursts of typing. “Seems like,” she says, and takes her glass from him when he offers it. “Guess we’ve inspired her.”

“It was quick thinking,” Bradford acknowledges. He sits gingerly down in the couch — it might be upholstered, but it’s by no means particularly comfortable — and picks up his own glass.

Kelly makes a little face, takes a quick gulp of the gin and tonic, and makes almost an identical face again as the liquor burns down her throat. Bradford, watching her reaction, makes a mental note that she doesn’t like gin, and does his best to hide his amusement at her clear distaste. “Ugh,” she says after recovering from the large mouthful of alcohol. “This is awful.” But almost immediately she takes another, smaller sip of the gin and tonic.

He takes a drink from his own glass, and though he isn’t particularly fond of gin and tonics either, he doesn’t let that dislike show on his face. “I was going to take her out,” he admits. “Pistol or knife — knife would have been quieter. It’d have meant bugging out of here, scrubbing the operation, but I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“I guessed that when I found the pistol,” Kelly agrees, and takes a long, slow breath. She exhales just as slowly, and Bradford is surprised to note that her fingers are trembling where they encircle her glass. Bradford doesn’t disturb her: he’s familiar with the crash of adrenaline and nerves that can come after a near miss. Instead, he allows himself to finish his gin and tonic slowly, and pours himself a second serving. Kelly, not usually one to have more than one drink, makes a face and downs the rest of her glass as well, and to his surprise, she holds the empty cup out to him for a refill. By the time he’s mixed her a second gin and tonic, she’s steadied herself.

“At least we’ve avoided disaster for another day,” she says. Her eyes are clear and amused when she smiles at him. “I’m sorry it was awkward. Thanks for being professional about it.”

Awkward and professional, he thinks, describe it fairly well. He lifts his glass in a brief salute to her; she raises hers in return, and they drink. 

“You realize,” he says after a moment, “that we’re going to have to keep this up for the rest of the month. Not just here, but probably at the hangar, too.”

The thought clearly hadn’t occurred to her yet; he watches the awareness settle across her face. “Oh,” she says, and looks down at her drink. “Hell.” Her smile, when she looks up, is wry. “No offense.”

Bradford just shakes his head, fully in sympathy with her reaction, and takes a sip of from his own glass. “I hate undercover missions,” he sighs, and then leans forward over the coffee table. “We’ve still got about an hour before Shen’s call,” he says. “Let’s see what we can manage to get organized before then.”


	9. 02-04: Acquiring Trust

# Acquisitions

## Section 2: Winning the Sky

### Chapter 4: Acquiring Trust

“So,” Bradford says forty minutes later as they wait for Shen’s call. “I figure you should probably stay here for the night.”

Kelly looks up from the hangar floor plan printout, which is spread across his coffee table, and he watches her blink and visibly shift gears away from planning their route to the Skyranger. Then she grimaces.

“The audience probably would expect it,” she agrees, gesturing vaguely at his front door, towards Nettles’s apartment door beyond it across the hallway. 

“There’s enough room,” he says, as if that makes the whole scenario acceptable. And, as he tries to think rationally about the position in which they’ve unexpectedly placed themselves, he adds, “And all things considered, this might be a good thing — she won’t get too curious if we keep odd hours, and we’re getting down to the wire here, so that’s a plus.”

“True enough,” she admits, and she leans back, stretching out after hunching over the floor plans for the better part of an hour. “But she’s nosy — we should get our stories straight. You might be able to brush her off in the hallway,” she says when he gives a derisive snort, “but she’ll hound me to no end, and judging by tonight, we’ll run into her fairly frequently.”

He raises a finger from the rim of his glass. “Luckily, my cover is as rude and belligerent as the real me, so I can tell her to fuck off,” he tells her, and Kelly laughs. He smirks, watching her grin and shake her head, and then shrugs. “But that won’t work for you, I suppose. We’ll work on it.”

“I forgot dinner,” Kelly realizes abruptly. She looks at the door, as if just remembering that she dropped the bag of take-out outside in the hallway and never bothered to pick it up again afterward. “Well, damn. I suppose I can’t go out to grab something without ruining the impression that we’re tearing each other’s clothing off.”

“I’ve got some stuff in the kitchen,” he tells her. “But we can order out — I probably don’t have anything good, and she can’t find fault with us ordering something in after the fact.”

Kelly laughs again, and shakes her head. “I suppose we’d better keep up the pretense,” she agrees. “Next time I’ll bring a change of clothes.”

Bradford glances at the clock. “Shen will check in with us soon,” he realizes, and gestures at the table. “Ready?”

The call from the Avenger — the real reason they are meeting together for the evening — goes as well as can be expected. Shen provides them with more information: the Spokesman has just sent out the final itinerary for the Speaker’s journey. The Speaker doesn’t travel often, and when he does, it’s meticulously organized. Hangar access will be restricted, and they’ll have a very narrow window of time between when the Speaker lands and when his Skyranger is slated to be locked down for repair. Success will depend on the Speaker’s itinerary, and they pore over every detail of it to plan their mission.

They spend the next hour and a half in conference with Shen and a few other groups, as originally planned. There are reports to share and monitor, data transmissions to memorize and delete, and Santiago comes through with aerial infrared satellite maps of the hangar which indicate a great deal of power and networking cables funneling into the storage facility.

All teams but one check in — there’s no response from Doucet’s team. At the end of the call, Shen promises to look into the matter.

“There have been a lot of arrests and raids lately,” Shen’s disembodied voice says over the console’s speakers as they finish up. Bradford is studying the aerials from Santiago, and Kelly is scanning through the proposed security measures on her tablet. Shen continues, “There’s been a push lately in the propaganda, trying to get more people to report anything suspicious, so be careful out there, Central.”

She sounds worried, and she’s clearly concerned enough to voice fears she’s never before revealed aloud. Bradford looks up from the maps, and meets Kelly’s eyes as she glances at him: there’s something measured there, guarded, that he can’t quite read. He stares back at her, trying to decipher that look, even as he replies to Shen.

“We had a close call here tonight,” he tells the engineer, keeping his voice even and his eyes on his partner. “But it defused quickly, and shouldn’t be an issue in the future.”

“Is everything okay?” Shen’s voice is thin, quick and frightened, and Bradford can’t blame her for the tension he can hear in her tone: there is so much riding on the next three weeks, so much balanced on her shoulders and his, and for all her dedication and her unswerving devotion to the cause, Shen’s young and relatively inexperienced. Kelly winces, and looks toward the console, and whatever he couldn’t identify in her face quickly morphs into regret at causing Shen worry.

“We’re fine,” Bradford assures her, and he looks away from Kelly to check the settings once more on the console speaker. “Everything was handled, and it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I’ll be staying over here for the night,” Kelly adds from his side, “just to be on the safe side. But it’s nothing to worry about.”

“If you say so,” Shen says, and there’s still an undercurrent of worry in her voice, audible even through the scratchy scrambled connection. “Don’t take any chances, either of you.”

“We won’t.” Bradford reaches for the console controls. “We’ll keep you updated, and we’re still good for the next check-in.”

“All right. Stay safe, both of you.”

The connection dies with the quiet screech of the scrambler as it goes into overdrive, bouncing the call through half a dozen towers and encryptions and encoders to ensure it can’t be traced back in either direction. Kelly regards Bradford over the new intelligence that is scattered across the coffee table. “Well,” she says, and drops into silence. He knows the feeling. Briefings can be draining in the best of times, and with Doucet’s team missing and Shen’s report of ADVENT’s intensified scrutiny, it’s hardly the best of times.

Bradford frowns down at their new notes, and realizes abruptly that he’s hungry and that he hasn’t ordered out for food yet.

He stands. “I’ll call out for food,” he says, to push away from the aftermath of the call with the Avenger. “We’ll want to spend more time working on this, anyway.”

He orders from the nearest place remaining that delivers actual food, not just protein packs or ADVENT burgers, and only realizes after the fact that they’ve eaten together enough times over the past few months that he can order fairly confidently for Kelly. She eyes him from where she sits on the floor when he’s done, and then she says simply, “You’ll want to change.”

“What?”

She gestures at the door. “How much do you want to bet that your neighbor is going to have her viewscreen turned on just in case she happens to catch something going on out in the hallway?”

He snorts. “I won’t take that bet.”

“Right,” Kelly agrees. She lifts her eyebrows. “And if we’ve just supposedly spent the last hour or two rolling around in bed, you probably shouldn’t be wearing the same clothes you were wearing before when you go out to get the food delivery.”

He glares at her, but she has a valid point: he remembers why he chose her out of all possible agents to work with him on this operation. She’s relatively unproven compared to some of the other soldiers in terms of combat expertise, but she’s got a solid head on her shoulders, a talent for improvisation, and a sharp eye for details, all important considerations for this kind of long-term operation. Feeling faintly ridiculous, he stalks over to his closet and starts to rummage through it. It’s not a large apartment, for all it’s in a good building. There’s one main room, with his bed, coffee table, and thinly-padded couch; a closet-like bathroom with a postage stamp of a shower and a toilet; and a laughably small modern kitchen with barely room for one person to stand at the sink. It means that Kelly can’t leave the room as he begins to pull his shirt off; instead, she turns her head and very deliberately studies the data scrolling across her tablet to offer him what privacy she can while Bradford strips out of his clothing. 

On the one hand, Bradford is a soldier and a professional. So is Kelly, for all she’s younger and less used to the actual military. This is the job, and God knows he’s stripped down to nothing in countless barracks, settlements, and field camps in front of other soldiers. There’s no shame or embarrassment in doing so, and hell, it’s not as though this is the first time he’s done this in front of Kelly anyway – he shared a shack with Kelly and four other soldiers for three months back in Esperanza before they retook the Avenger, and they continued to share a communal barracks on the Avenger itself afterward. It’s not like this is anything new for either of them.

On the other hand, Bradford doesn’t make a habit of kissing his coworkers, or of planning to enter into undercover romantic relationships with soldiers who are technically under his command. It shouldn’t feel awkward to appear bare-chested and barefoot in front of Kelly now, but it does. Despite wearing the faded sweatpants he sleeps in — pants he’s worn to PT in her presence dozens of times back on the Avenger — it feels strangely intimate to turn back to her so half-dressed. He’s not self-conscious, exactly, to bare so much of his body to her. He knows she’s no stranger to the impersonal nudity of barracks life, either, and God knows he’s used to it. Still, he’s more aware than usual of the long-healed scars across his lean chest as he moves back towards the couch and coffee table. It feels different — more vulnerable, somehow, even though he hasn’t truly considered Kelly a threat since he’s met her. 

“Here,” he says to distract them both from the strangeness of everything. “You’ll want something to sleep in.” He tosses clothes at her, and then it is his turn to look away while she changes. It’s not that he deliberately tries to pay attention as she takes her turn, but he can hear the rustles of her movement as she changes. He can’t help but notice that Kelly moves with the same military-practical economy of motion he’s used to as she strips off her clothes and steps into a pair of his sweatpants and a t-shirt probably as old as she is. It’s a relief, in a way, to know that she’s as calm about this as he is: this isn’t anything more than what it is, an awkward and necessary deception, and they’re both professional enough to acknowledge that and move on.

She looks small when she’s done, but then he’s larger than her, and borrowing his clothes only highlights that difference between them. Her feet are pale against the carpet, the toenails painted an incongruous light teal against her skin, and she flushes a bit when he notices and raises an eyebrow at her.

“A girl’s allowed some fun,” Kelly says by way of explanation, and settles back down on the floor beside the coffee table. He knows she must be nearly forty by now, but she looks suddenly young and ridiculous in her borrowed clothing, and he can’t help the chuckle that escapes his lips. She looks indignant at the laugh, which only makes the situation worse: the sweatpants she’s borrowed are loose around her hips, the shirt baggy and overlarge on her more petite frame, and Bradford is still chuckling when the door chimes.

It means he’s got a smile on his face when he signs for the food, which he’s sure Nettles will notice if she really is spying on them from her vantage point through the door across the hallway. All things considered, he doesn’t mind too much.

They eat as they study the proposed agenda for the Speaker’s visit. It’s odd to work so professionally, side-by-side, critiquing angles and attack vectors and potential escape routes, even as they are barefoot and dressed for bed. But they spend another hour leaning over the table, Bradford on the uncomfortable couch and Kelly sitting on the floor beside the table, eating and planning, before they agree they’ve done as much as they can for the night with the new information.

He feels a wave of something like fondness for her as they begin the clean-up, destroying sensitive print-outs, encrypting important data, and sweeping aside the remnants of dinner. It’s an uncomfortable situation, he thinks, watching her frown over her tablet as she compresses and encrypts new data onto it, but she’s handling it well. He’s suddenly proud of her for thinking of this awkward solution, for rolling past the embarrassment, for being the professional she is and putting aside any personal discomfort for the sake of the mission.

“There’s the bed, the couch, and the floor,” he finds himself saying. “You’re welcome to half the bed if you’re not one of those women who steal all the covers.”

“Only if you don’t snore,” she retorts almost absently, still fiddling with her tablet, and with that light exchange, the potentially knotty problem of sleeping arrangements is solved.

They take the time to clear all traces of their covert activities before they retire: the tablet is hidden, the console wiped clean, and all signs of their intelligence gathering are swept away. Bradford makes a point of showing her where he keeps his spare knife and how to pull the pistol out of the mount behind the wall unit; she has a knife of her own, and leaves it tucked into her boots under the bed when she takes her spot beside him. Neither of them speak once the lights go off: it’s too intimate, too close, too strange. Instead, they lie side by side on the bed, not touching and not speaking. Bradford stays awake until her breathing evens out into sleep, and only then does he shut his eyes and will himself to sleep.

He expected awkwardness in the morning, and is relieved when none emerges. 

He wakes before she does, and so he’s dressed and moving quietly through the kitchen when she rolls out of bed and reaches for her own regular clothing. They share fairly terrible coffee standing together in the kitchen, quietly trading questions back and forth to confirm at least a few details about this new development in their covers before they head out to face the day. 

They leave his apartment together, and Bradford is careful to look cheerful and to hold her hand as they head down the hall towards the elevators, just in case Nettles is out and about in the early morning. Kelly looks appropriately sheepish, a bit rumpled in her prior day’s clothing, but she makes a show of running her hands up and down his arm as they wait for the elevator and of beaming at him whenever he looks at her.

Arriving at the hangar together causes no amount of whispers and rumors among their coworkers, most of whom are still holding out hope that bets about marriage will pay off. Bradford grits his teeth and ignores most of them through sheer willpower. Luckily for him, he’s intimidating enough between his appearance and his personality that no one directly asks him about it; Kelly, he sees, has no such luck, and by the time they meet for lunch, the quick eyeroll she gives him right before she very obviously kisses his cheek in greeting speaks volumes.

They make a show of sitting quite a bit closer than usual as they eat lunch together, and though he finds the whole thing remarkably over-the-top, once he’s clocked out for the day, Bradford makes his way back through the hangar to where Kelly sits at her desk on the second floor. “I’m off for the day,” he tells her, making no effort to hush his voice for the benefit of the three other maintenance supervisors sitting at their desks in the same room as Kelly. 

“Oh,” she says, and gives him a fairly genuine smile. “All right. I’ll see you tomorrow then?”

“Yeah.” And after a moment of standing and staring, Bradford heaves a mental sigh, leans across her desk, and gives her a very brief kiss. “Have a good night, sweetheart.”

Kelly’s smile has shifted from delighted to satisfied; she is, Bradford thinks with amusement, an excellent actress. “I will. Thanks, Brian.”

Her coworkers have at least the courtesy to wait until he leaves the office before they begin teasing her, but the laughter follows him down the hallway and he can’t help but grimace.

Still, for as awful as it could have been, this new twist to their covers isn’t that bad.

Bradford is well aware that Kelly bears the brunt of the work in the matter: no one ever approaches him about it, aside from a good-natured slap on the back from another taciturn pilot who congratulates him on snaring Kelly as though she were some prize he’d won. She’s the one who is accosted in the hallway by Nettles and invited out for coffee; she’s the one who has to make up the details of their fake relationship and prior history when their coworkers beg her for gossip. But it’s better that way. Bradford is a soldier, and he dislikes undercover work. Kelly has more than a decade and a half of experience pretending to be various people she’s not, and she’s lived undercover in the ADVENT-controlled city centers for most of the past seventeen years. He’s perfectly content to let her shoulder the weight in terms of adding this new twist to their covers: she will, he knows, sell it far more convincingly than he ever could.

Because they both understand it’s awkward, it’s actually remarkably easy to handle the intimacy that they must fake in public. She slides her right hand around his left arm sometimes when they leave the hangar together, as though he were a chivalrous knight escorting her home, and she makes a point to kiss him hello in the doorway whenever she comes over for their evening meetings. He tries to remember to kiss her farewell in front of the elevator when she leaves, and does his best to hold her hand as they’re coming and going from his apartment.

Bradford can’t say it’s particularly comfortable to fake so much affection for Kelly. It’s not easy for him to surrender his personal space, even with a partner he tolerates as well as Kelly. He still doesn’t know her very well, for all he’s known her for two years. Mostly it’s just due to timing: a few months of living together in Esperanza before they retook the Avenger and the occasional few weeks when she returned to the Avenger in between her assignments weren’t amazingly conducive towards actually getting to learn what she’s like as a person rather than a soldier or operative. Still, what little he does know of her isn’t anything to shy away from, and she doesn’t flinch at his touch the way he sometimes twitches away from her hands.

“Sorry,” he mutters the fourth time he startles away from her fingers, when she reaches for his hand on the tram they’re taking out for dinner and he jerks back out of habit.

Kelly’s smile is brief and all too sympathetic, completely understanding of the strange situation they find themselves in. “No, I’m sorry,” she says simply. “I know it’s difficult.” 

It isn’t what either of them expected out of this mission, but he takes her smaller hand in his all the same to try to make up for his failings. “I’m not good at this,” he admits, choosing his words carefully because they’re in a crowded public tram.

Her fingers tighten against his. “You’re managing pretty well,” she says, and though her voice is light and teasing, Bradford understands that he’s at least earned her approval for his paltry attempts at maintaining their cover.

He goes out of his way, after that, to try to stay relaxed when she touches him, to occasionally be the one to instigate contact. But his last real relationship had been before he’d been assigned to XCOM, back when he’d been in the Special Forces; it’s somewhat mortifying to realize that aside from brief casual encounters and one-night stands, he’s nearly twenty years out of practice with women. 

Still, for all he’s rusty, it doesn’t take long for him to figure out how to play his part, and she’s patient with him while he adapts. It’s surprising, too, how fast certain habits form: kissing her at the door when she comes over for dinner, a hand on the small of her back when they walk together into work, picking up an extra drink at the end of his shift to drop off at her desk on his way out. All small things, really, all done without the actual affection that they indicate, but they become routine easily enough as the weeks slip by. And, he thinks, they all look more impressive than they actually are. Their kisses are remarkably chaste, stage kisses and nothing more. When they hold hands, it’s less romantic and more for support. The way Kelly links her arm with his when they walk together feels less like she’s expecting courtesy and more like they’re forming a solid wall, a barrier protecting each other.

Kelly’s not his type — too young, too self-contained, too flippant, too unknown — but Bradford’s willing to admit he’d rather be partnered with her than anyone else for this kind of mess. She’s practical, hard-working, and willing to compromise when necessary. Moreover, she has a decent sense of humor and her eye for the ridiculous seems to be about in line with his, which is never more obvious than when they are treated to one spectacularly embarrassing and dry lecture from his supervisor. That balding man not-so-casually interrupts them as they’re leaving the hangar together one evening. He is quick to inform them that there’s not officially an anti-fraternization policy in place for employees, but he’s just as quick to ask them to please remember to be professional adults about the whole matter regardless of how it ends.

It’s a ridiculous discussion, made even more surreal by the fact that Bradford knows for certain that his supervisor — who dislikes him — has bet a fairly significant amount of money predicting that they’ll be split up within the month. Judging by the odd look on Kelly’s face, she’s as aware of the lunch room betting pools as he is, and once they manage to escape the lecture, it only takes the briefest glance at each other before they have to look away, lips pressed together to keep mirth from escaping. Kelly quotes half the man’s speech, word-for-word, once they’re in the safety of his apartment, more or less falling over from laughing so hard, and Bradford resolves that they can keep this charade up for the remainder of the month if for no other reason than to make that man lose his bet and his money.

All in all, though, introducing the relationship to their cover stories is less uncomfortable than Bradford expected, and far more useful. Rachel Nettles stops harassing him with pleasantries in the hallways, and she no longer attempts to corner Kelly and demand that she explain her frequent visits. Instead, she takes Kelly off to coffee once a week or so, and has the disconcerting habit of occasionally knocking on Bradford’s door during their dinner nights to offer them various baked goods as some kind of apology for doubting their intentions. It’s ridiculous, and Bradford and Kelly both agree that Nettles has too much time on her hands for as often as she seems to be in the hallway or elevator when they’re coming and going. Still, the fictitious relationship provides an excellent excuse for Kelly to bring a duffel bag of gear from her apartment to his, in absolute plain sight; she confesses to Nettles, who of course catches her by the elevators, that she’s been invited to keep a few of her things over at his place, and that’s the end of any suspicions. 

Bradford grows used to sharing his bed — in the most literal sense — with Kelly, and they fall into polite habits in the enforced proximity of his small apartment: turning away when the other changes, not mentioning any accidental slumbering contact, and generally trying to remain as pragmatic as possible about the whole thing. Neither of them are truly well-designed for a relationship, even a false one: they’re both too self-contained and too scarred by who they’ve become in the seventeen years since the aliens first arrived. In his more truthful moments, Bradford doubts that either of them are even well-designed to work with partners. He’s too used to being Central, to commanding from a distance and having his every order followed without question; she’s too used to relying on herself, to carrying everything important in her mind with no need to share details or plans with anyone else.

It means he tends to be imperious and she tends to be secretive, and it means both of them are too used to thinking for themselves without bothering to check in with others. They’re both well aware of their flaws, and they’re both working on compensating for them, but some days, especially when things are a bit more stressful than usual, it’s hard for Bradford to remember that.

“Could you maybe _warn me_ , next time?” he asks Kelly in a low, accusing tone as they hurry through the darkened hangar bay. It’s after hours, and they’ve disabled the security feeds for twenty minutes, which is not much time to get from the first-floor lobby to the rooftop hangar bay where the Speaker’s Skyranger will dock in four days. This is supposed to be just a dry run, a practice trip, and so they have to not only reach the roof but successfully return from it as well. It makes for a tight schedule.

They had not been expecting to find two janitors in the middle of a clearly unauthorized poker break in the second supply room. Bradford had been about to insist on scrubbing the practice run and retreating, when Kelly had — recklessly, in his opinion, and without any warning to him — used a nearby terminal to remotely trigger a high-pitched alarm from the lobby.

It sent both janitors scurrying to deal with it, and it had nearly startled Bradford into shooting both of them — which would have ruined everything — before Kelly had grabbed at his arm and wildly gestured for him to keep moving.

“There wasn’t _time_ to warn you,” Kelly hisses back at him quietly. “It’s just an air-quality alert; they’ll get there and it’ll shut down and they’ll chalk it up to malfunction.”

Bradford keys in a door code; it slides open soundlessly, and he hurries into the next room. “You can’t just do things like that without telling me,” he berates her, remembering to keep his voice down even in his frustration. 

“What, I need to stop to ask permission every time I want to solve a problem?” she snipes back in a whisper. She darts past him towards the final door, covering the right side almost automatically.

“That’d be a good start,” he tells her dryly, finding humor in the situation despite himself, and even though she’s got a black facemask covering her mouth, he can see the corners of her eyes crinkle and knows that she’s smiling herself. 

He taps in the door code, and there’s a long minute of tense silence as the security lock cycles through the numbers. Then, agonizingly slowly, the inner hangar door lifts, revealing the roof.

Bradford steps into the doorway, and Kelly moves to stand next to him. “That took a good sixty seconds longer than it should have to decode the key,” she murmurs. “We’ll need to adjust the timing.”

He agrees, and glances around the roof. It’s a familiar sight, even lit by floodlights against the dark sky: he’s been flying transports out of it for three months, and there are no new surprises. “We don’t have time to do another run,” he says, keeping his voice low. He looks up and down the hangar, counting bays and double-checking camera placements. “Roof looks clear.”

She’s checking something on her tablet, which she stuffs back into a thigh pocket after only a few seconds. “Lobby alarm cleared, marked as a malfunction,” she reports. “Janitors look like they’re in the lunch room — lights are activated there, at least.”

“Back the way we came,” Bradford orders, and within eight minutes, they’re slipping out the side door into the alleyway on the east side of the building. They put back on the jackets they’d stashed near the neatly-lined trash bins, stuffing face masks and gloves into their pockets as they drift towards the front of the alley. Bradford hides his pistol in a slim shoulder harness under his jacket, and Kelly carefully adjusts the fit of her jacket’s belt to better hide the thin smoke bombs she carries at her waist.

There’s laughter and a drunken chorus of song from down the sidewalk. The hangar is located in the heart of downtown: there are always people wandering about the streets. Bradford glances out of the alleyway and winces: it’s a group of eight or ten university students, staggering down the road. Too many to take out with any kind of silence, he thinks, and too close not to notice if they step out of the alleyway and casually begin walking away. Options flit through his brain, and just as Kelly notices the footsteps of the oncoming crowd and jerks her head in up alarm, Bradford grabs for her, hauls her up against him, and kisses her.

The voices come closer, and Kelly reaches out to grip the lapels of his jacket. She pulls him closer, backing up against the alley wall; he follows her, a bare step behind her, until her back is pressed against the wall and he’s all but blocking her completely from view. He bends his head down to press his lips against hers more firmly just as footsteps patter past the alley. Someone notices them, and calls out a crude suggestion; the drunk’s friends laugh and chime in as they pass by. 

Bradford doesn’t look up. He tightens his grip on Kelly’s waist, and kisses her as though he hasn’t registered the commentary. This closeness with her has become familiar, after weeks of pretending, but he hasn’t needed to kiss her this intensely since that first showy kiss in front of Nettles weeks ago. He’s more aware of where their mouths meet together now, of what she tastes like and how her lips feel, and it’s not an unpleasant thing to kiss her to keep their cover secure. Kelly slides her hands up his shoulders to place them around the back of his head; he hitches her up the wall a few inches, pressing his body against hers to help support her weight as he lifts her up so that it’s easier for their lips to met. 

Within a minute, the drunks have passed by. Bradford lifts his lips away from Kelly’s, resting his forehead against hers as they both take quick breaths to recover. He risks a look over his shoulder, not moving away from Kelly yet as he assesses the street. Only once it’s clear that the drunks are still moving down the block does Bradford step back, lowering her to the ground again. Her arms slip down his shoulders, and she looks up at him with an amused cast to her eyes. Her lips — a bit flushed from kissing him; he tries not to think about it — quirk up into a mocking little smile. 

“Weren’t you just saying,” she asks him conversationally, stepping to his side and hooking her arm through his for the walk back to his apartment, “that we needed to ask for permission before we solved problems?”

Bradford considers all his options for replies, and settles on the easiest. “Don’t be a smartass,” he says, and Kelly laughs and squeezes his arm as they step out of the alleyway and into the public streets. They’re just another couple out for the evening as they drift towards his apartment.

Still, he’s validated four nights later, when they’re tense and humming with nerves because the Speaker’s Skyranger is parked on the roof above them and there’s a security detail that hadn’t been reported on their intel between them and their goal.

They’re standing one on either side of the doorway, sharing a tight glance that is at once annoyed and desperate, and then Kelly’s eyes clear, and she looks at the three security guards once more, and then back at Bradford.

“Central,” she says, so softly he can barely hear her even with his earpiece relaying her voice through their shared comm system. “Permission to solve problems?”

Amusement spikes through his mission-focus mindset, bringing with it pride and honest affection. But that brief burst of emotion is followed swiftly by relief: he has no idea what she’s going to do, but she’s earned his trust in the past three months, more so than she has in the past two years. He believes that whatever idea she has, it’ll do what is required. He doesn’t need to know the details.

“Go for it,” he says, and trusts his partner’s judgment.


	10. 02-05: Acquiring Success

# Acquisitions

## Section 2: Winning the Sky

### Chapter 5: Acquiring Success

The Skyranger is ridiculously touchy.

For an experienced pilot with a deft hand and a light touch, he’s sure it’s a dream to fly. It’s remarkably maneuverable, instantly responsive, and far faster than anything Bradford’s dealt with since flight school, which was nearly thirty years ago.

For Bradford, it’s a nightmare. The merest twitch of his hands sends the Skyranger careening off course, and the acceleration is enough to test the limits of the anti-gravity stabilizers in the cockpit. He’s grateful Kelly has taken charge of communications: he’s entirely focused on flying, trying to reach their rendezvous point without crashing them into any of the high-rise buildings clustered around them like trees. He’s trained as a pilot, yes, and he’s been doing basic barge runs in shuttles for the past three months — but the Skyranger is hardly a shuttle. This is not anything he’s comfortable with, and he’s insanely grateful they have a real pilot ready and waiting to take over at their rendezvous point.

“Eighteen kilometers and closing,” Kelly’s voice says into his left ear through the radio. There’s a strange, tinny echo to hearing her words twice, once from where she’s crammed into the cockpit behind him and then again through his earpiece. “Firebrand says she’ll send flares up in two minutes — there’s a high-rise helicopter pad where we’ll make the transfer, on top of some office building.” The ship lurches as he swerves them around an especially wide skyscraper, and he hears her mutter, “If you don’t crash us first.”

“Shut up,” he manages, more to indicate that he’s heard her than to actually respond. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, and he’s thankful he’s still wearing his gloves: for all they make it even harder to handle the delicate flight controls, they’re keeping his hands from slipping on the console. 

His headrests creaks as she tightens her grip on it. There’s no copilot’s seat, and the back of the Skyranger is sealed off from the cockpit and code-locked, something they hadn’t expected. It’s a serious problem for the rest of their evening, and not exactly a boon for the present: they’d planned to ride in the Skyranger’s back passenger compartment on their way out of the city center, and Kelly was supposed to travel in it for this short flight out to meet their actual pilot. But now Kelly is kneeling behind him in the little space offered around the back of the pilot’s chair. They’d had a brief and intense argument about it back at the hangar when they’d discovered the code-locked door, but leaving her behind to face blaring alarms and approaching ADVENT troopers on her own hadn’t been an option Bradford was willing to consider. She’s crammed into the small space behind the pilot’s chair, possible only because she’s a small and impressively flexible woman able to contort herself into a space not designed for a human body. If there’s any kind of crash, she’ll likely be dead, either from impact or from sitting atop the explosives designed to eject the pilot’s chair to safety. But she stays silent, and trusts in his clumsy skill. 

Another two minutes tick by in tense silence, and then there is suddenly a flare of red ahead at their eleven o’clock. “There,” Kelly says unnecessarily, and more specifically, into her microphone, “Copy, Firebrand; starting our approach.”

Aside from one extra group of security guards — handled deftly by a smoke grenade — and a sealed passenger compartment on the Skyranger itself, their plan has so far gone off perfectly. There are alerts out now, of course, but they had the twenty minutes of head start that they’d needed to get the Skyranger out of the heart of the city center. There will be more Skyrangers and military craft scrambled and launched to hunt them down, but so far, the mission has gone as well as anyone could have hoped. 

It would be a shame, Bradford acknowledges, to wreck that perfection by plowing the Skyranger into the top of his landing zone.

His hands are steady as he brings the Skyranger shuddering around to line up with the flares despite the tight knot of anxiety in his stomach. The helipad looks empty, but he can see a tall female figure huddled by the access stairs waiting for them. 

“Final approach,” he says out loud, more for Kelly’s benefit than his, and starts up the landing routine with focused precision. It’s difficult to move the Skyranger directly over the flares, to keep it steady as he drops altitude and cycles through the landing systems. When the craft settles down onto the ground — mostly in the correct position — he hears Kelly’s soft sigh from behind him and doesn’t begrudge her the relief. He blows out a shaky breath himself, and feels tension leave his shoulders as the craft drops down onto its landing gear and is still.

He presses the cockpit door release, and undoes his seat restraints. “Let’s get moving,” he says, pulling himself out of his seat and reaching a hand back to help haul Kelly from where she’s pinned in behind his seat. 

There’s a blonde woman waiting for them as they slide the few feet down from the cockpit to the rooftop, and she steps forward warily as they reach the ground. She’s dressed in a green piloting jumpsuit, and has a helmet tucked under her arm: Bradford’s never met her before, but Shen swore up and down that she was the best pilot XCOM could rustle up on short notice for this.

“Central,” she says to him with a nod, looking up behind him at the Skyranger. “Nice delivery.”

“All yours, Firebrand,” he says back, glad to pass over the duty of flying it. “You’re on your own for extraction — the back’s sealed off and we don’t have the time to crack it open.”

Worry flickers in the pilot’s eyes when she looks back down at them. “You two have another evac plan?” she asks. 

“We’re covered,” Bradford says, though he has no real idea how he and Kelly will escape the city center now that their evacuation plan is unusable. “You’ve got inbounds in less than three minutes,” he reminds the pilot.

“Right,” she says, and holds out her hand for a brief shake. “Thanks for the bird, Central. I’ll see you in Kansas.”

Bradford and Kelly move to flank each other beneath the Skyranger’s nose, each dropping to a knee and holding out a hand. Firebrand is tall for a pilot: she steps forward, grabs at their hands, puts a booted foot up first onto Bradford’s extended leg and then onto Kelly’s offered shoulder and then again onto Bradford’s shoulder, a haphazard ladder of willing bodies, and between the two of them, they’re able to boost her high enough that she can scramble into the cockpit without needing an access ramp.

The cockpit door seals behind her, and there’s a pause of a few seconds, then the Skyranger’s engines flare brighter, the ground rumbles, and the aircraft gracefully lifts off. The afterburners kick on the instant it’s cleared the edge of building, and there’s a burst of wind and a flare of light from the engine exhausts. The Skyranger takes off at high speed through the rising skyscrapers towards the setting sun, darting carelessly between the high-rises and spinning faster off into the starry night sky.

“What’s the plan?” Kelly asks, and he appreciates how she refrains from commenting on just how much better Firebrand’s piloting is compared to his.

Bradford’s been considering that since they determined they had no way to access the Skyranger’s passenger compartment. He pulls the dark watch cap off his head, tugs down the black cloth that had been covering his face, and starts to strip off his gloves as he makes for the stairwell. 

“Scrub everything from the mission,” he tells her, gesturing at her gear. “We’ll see if we can get through the city without being flagged. If it’s clear, we can head back to the apartment, grab what we can, and catch the first train out west we can find.”

Kelly follows his lead, stripping off the gear she’d used to mask her identity. She hands it to him when he gestures for it, and dutifully if reluctantly adds her remaining smoke grenade and the two knives she nearly always carries. Once the bundle is safely in his hands, he pitches it off the side of the building, and follows it with his own weaponry and gear. Their radios are the last to go, earpieces flickering out of sight down the steep grey building walls. 

“It’ll take us a few hours to get across the city,” she points out. “We should keep an ear out to see what makes the news.”

It’s a long hike down the emergency stairs to the city streets far below them, and they have to dodge around three different groups of advancing ADVENT troopers as they leave the building. “There will be more patrols incoming, if they tracked the Skyranger,” Kelly says quietly from behind him as they step onto a local tram. She moves to stand in front of him, twining her arms around him and resting her head against his chest. There’s a fair crowd on the tram — the Speaker has just finished making his effusively over-the-top dedication speech, and it seems like half the city is on their way home after heading out to listen to him. 

Bradford wonders if she can hear the fast beat of his heart, and instead of speaking, wraps his own arms around her and lets her use him as a buffer against the crowd as more and more bodies press aboard the tram at each stop. They’re going the wrong direction — north, where his apartment is south of them — but it puts distance between them and the scene of the transfer, which is what they need. They spend the better part of an hour in silence, surrounded by crowds and riding through city streets surrounded by cheerful people eager to talk about the Speaker’s words of praise. After forty minutes, they start to change trams every few stations, beginning to make their way south again. They’re probably scanned dozens of times as they make their way through checkpoints and bottlenecks, but neither of them are now carrying anything that would set off any alarms. They’re both dressed in the black clothing they’d chosen for the mission, of course; there’s nothing they can do about that. But their radios and weapons and anything remotely suspicious are now probably lying broken at the bottom of their transfer zone, and they’d taken great care to block security footage and hide their faces inside the hangar itself. Now they are just just two people in dark clothing, part of a throng of humanity trying to get home after listening to the Speaker.

It’s past midnight by the time they reach the last tram station to take them home. They started off a long way from his apartment, and the tram system was never designed to move this many people at once. There are delays and extra checkpoints with ADVENT soldiers stationed to direct the crowds the Speaker’s visit has created. With every checkpoint and tram station, Bradford expects their false identification to fail, either flagged as suspicious for being fake or because they’ve been tied to the hangar invasion and loss of the Speaker’s Skyranger. But instead, each time they reach a checkpoint or a scanner, they’re waved through with the distant military courtesy ADVENT is famous for, and no one ever eyes them with distrust.

They board the last tram nearly at one in the morning, both of them running low on energy. Bradford’s not honestly sure how much of the slump of his shoulders is feigned. He picks a seat near the back of the tram, settles into it with a sigh, and wraps an absent arm around Kelly’s shoulders when she flops down next to him and leans against his side. It’s been a long day, he thinks, idly running his fingers up and down the long sleeve of her black shirt, and it’s not over yet. They’ll have to scour the newsfeeds — ADVENT and otherwise — when they get back to his place for any information on the Skyranger’s theft. They’ll have to somehow get into contact with the Avenger, to convince Shen and the others that they’re not dead and that missing their extraction point wasn’t the end of the world. They’ll have to figure out their own extraction, how to escape the city center and return to the Avenger without attracting too much attention. And if they’re smart, he recognizes with a mental groan, they’ll use this setback to their advantage, and find a way to get out of the city without burning their clearly impressive cover identification — any covers forged tight enough to withstand the ADVENT scrutiny of the past four hours are covers worth keeping intact.

It’s going to be a long night, he thinks wearily, and drowses for the last run back to the station near his apartment. His steps are slow as they make their way down lit city streets toward his apartment building, and he’s grateful for the excuse of having to match his longer stride to Kelly’s shorter legs, because he’s not sure if he has the energy to hurry. 

They make it to the elevators and wait together in silence. Everything is going as well as they could have hoped for, when the building doors slide open and there’s the click of heels on the tile floor.

“Oh!” Rachel Nettles says, recognizing them in an instant. She stares, obviously surprised to find them, and Kelly’s tired body goes tense under his arm. 

“Rachel.” Kelly greets her politely, and though Bradford can feel the exhaustion in her frame, she gives his hand a squeeze and pulls away from him, turning a bit to face Nettles, putting her body between him and the other woman to deflect Nettles’s attention onto her and give Bradford a bit of a rest. He could kiss her — truly, not for show — for that kindness; he cannot stand Nettles, and Kelly deals with her far better than he can. She proves it, by saying to Nettles, “You’re coming home awfully late tonight too. What did you think of the speech?”

Nettles shakes her head once, slowly, keeping her eyes on Kelly. “Not his best, I’m afraid,” she says. She looks away, takes a breath, and makes her way to stand next to them as they wait for the elevator. “But that’s perhaps understandable, given the circumstances. You’ve heard about his transport being stolen, I assume, since you both work at Marthgate Hangars?”

There had been a single brief news bulletin about it two trams earlier. “Just the basics,” Kelly assures her, and the elevator arrives. The three of them step into it together, companionably enough. “I can’t believe it. I hope no one at the hangar was hurt.”

There were at least three ADVENT soldiers knocked out by Kelly’s smoke bomb, Bradford recalls; two more are definitely dead on the first floor, another two in the corridor leading to the hangar bay, and there had been six on the roof. Three probably living, and ten probably dead — a sharp blow to ADVENT’s pride, if nothing else, but hardly a disaster for them.

“I haven’t gotten any notifications from the office,” Bradford interjects, though that’s a lie: his company-issued mobile is upstairs in his apartment, and he has no way of knowing if there are notifications waiting for him. 

“I see,” Nettles murmurs. Still not looking at them, she says carefully, “When I heard it was Marthgate Hangars, I immediately thought of you two.”

There is an undercurrent to her voice which has the hair on the back of Bradford’s neck standing up, something knowing and speculative all at once that has nothing to do with neighborly concern. Kelly must have picked up on it, but her reply gives no hint of awareness of anything beyond friendly reassurance.

“Well, we’re perfectly safe, at least,” Kelly tells Nettles. “We went to hear the speech and stayed out for a late dinner to wait out the crowds. We just heard the announcement about the transport on one of our trams coming back.”

“I’m glad you’re both safe,” Nettles says, and the elevator door opens on their floor. “I’d hate for anything to go wrong for you two.”

“Well, this is a setback, of course,” Kelly answers her, and gestures to let the older woman step out of the elevator ahead of them. “But we’re both safe, and that’s what matters.”

An idea flickers to life in Bradford’s tired mind, and he grasps at it and doesn’t think too much about it. “It does mean that we’re both probably going to be out of work by morning,” he says to Kelly as they follow Nettles down the hallway. He gives her a pointed look as her only warning, and adds, “You’re still all right with marrying me and moving back north even if we’re both unemployed to start it off?”

Nettles inhales sharply from ahead of them, and nearly trips in her expensive heels. Kelly gives him a look that contains outright laughter carefully hidden behind a more appropriate facade of affection. “I already told you yes,” Kelly says as Ann, stopping in the hallway to take his hands in hers and face him directly. “Do you really expect me to back out now?”

Amusement spikes through his exhaustion. “Last chance,” he warns her, and brings her hands up to his lips to kiss them. “Because after the mess at the hangar tonight, I might just drag you up to the peacekeeping office tomorrow to make it official right away. We do it right, this time tomorrow we could be married and on the next train heading north.”

Kelly sways forward against him, slow and content and clearly inviting him to kiss her. “I could live with that,” she murmurs, tilting her head towards him. “It’s a good night for a fresh start after that disaster. I wouldn’t mind leaving Marthgate behind for good after this.”

As he moves closer to her, Bradford realizes that it’s the last time he’ll kiss her: the mission is over, and they’re going to work on extracting themselves from their covers and this facade of a relationship as soon as Nettles is out of sight. There will be no need to kiss her again after this, and that thought makes him gentle when he bends down to touch his lips to hers for a very brief kiss. Her lips are warm and soft beneath his, and the kiss is nothing like the other ones they’ve shared before as Brian and Ann. More real, he thinks, more themselves than their covers, and though it doesn’t last long, he can almost taste that difference against her lips.

He can see the same realization in Kelly’s eyes when he lifts his head from hers, something quiet and honest, and she takes a breath afterward that is slow and steady. He watches her settle back into the role of Ann with only a blink of tired eyes; he knows her well enough now to see the invisible veil she drops down over herself as she tucks Kelly away and brings her cover’s persona to the fore. They won’t talk about how the kiss was more than it was supposed to be, Bradford thinks, seeing that veil come down, and he isn’t sure if he’s relieved by that or not.

“Congratulations,” Nettles murmurs quietly from where she stands, and both Bradford and Kelly turn to her. Bradford, exhausted and ready to be done with the mission, isn’t entirely sure he hadn’t actually forgotten her for a few brief seconds. Nettles’s smile is pleased, if tired. “I wish you both nothing but the best. Though,” she adds, a tinge of regret in her voice, “I’m sure I’ll miss you both. It’s hard to make friends here, and I was happy to finally have neighbors I could talk to.” 

“Oh!” And Kelly drops Bradford’s hands to step across the hall and give the other woman a hug. “We should stay in touch,” she tells Nettles, who is at least as surprised by the hug as Bradford is. “Please. I would like to stay friends, even if we’re moving on.”

The request clearly pleases Nettles, and she unbends just enough to give Kelly a gentle hug in return. “I’d like that,” she says. “You have my address, of course. I’d be happy to hear from you once you’re settled again. But until then…” She looks past Kelly to Bradford, and he’s not sure if he imagines the small smile she gives him or not. “You have a great deal to do tonight, if I’m not mistaken. I should leave you to it.”

And she makes a polite final farewell, and steps into her own apartment. Bradford keys open his own door, and he and Kelly enter it together. Once the door shuts on the empty hallway behind them, they share a long look between the two of them. He deliberately doesn’t think about kissing her again, and instead he gestures at the closed door.

“Do you think she suspects something?” Bradford asks.

Kelly’s mouth twists unhappily. “I know she suspects something,” she sighs. “But I think she’s also a romantic, and willing to overlook quite a lot if it means she gets to see a happy ending in progress.” And she lifts an eyebrow at Bradford, her expression switching from a frown toward mirth. “Married?” she asks. A smile plays around the corner of her lips. “And here I thought I was being forward when I made up that whole pining-for-you-in-secret bit in the first place.”

He snorts, just as entertained as she is. “Consider it payback for that,” he says, striding across the room to turn on the wall console. “It fits, though — it’s the perfect excuse for both of us to disappear at once without blowing our covers to hell, and let’s face it, that means my asshole of a supervisor will lose his bet in the lunch room.”

Her laugh is short and delighted. “You’re a vindictive, petty man, Central,” Kelly says, honest and amused. “I do like you.”

He gives her an equally honest smile in return, and together they turn to the newsfeeds to see what they can learn about the aftermath of their heist. There’s not much available that they didn’t already learn on the tram: it’s an embarrassing loss for the Speaker and ADVENT, and they likely won’t publicize it much. But there’s little information in the other, smaller newsfeeds which ADVENT doesn’t control, which is a good sign.

There’s no way to tell if Firebrand and the Skyranger made it out of the city center to safety, and without a set time for checking in with Shen, the only message they can get off has to be sent the old-fashioned way through the satellite towers. They choose a brief phrase as their code, and only once that message is safely off does Bradford hunt down his work-issued mobile unit and check for messages.

“Nothing,” he says after a long moment. “Well. How do we want to do this?”

They plan their cover story convincingly, and despite the risk, agree that they should go into the hangar the next morning as though they were exactly who they are pretending to be and nothing more. There’s the danger of increased scrutiny and extra ADVENT personnel, and for all they have excellent fake identification, there’s always the potential that it will send up a red flag somewhere. But the chance to salvage this exit without burning their covers is too good to pass up: false identities are getting harder and harder to acquire these days, and if they’re able to extricate themselves without completely wrecking their covers, it’ll make future operations far less risky.

So they ride the tram together into work the next morning, and act appropriately somber and curious with coworkers who had heard the same newsfeed rumors about the attack on the hangar. The hangar itself, when they arrive, is completely sealed off: they’re directed into an adjacent building with all of their other coworkers, where a woman with slicked-back hair and a black suit quietly informs them of the public version of the story. There’s shock, of course, and fear: Bradford figures the circumstances allow for PDA even at work, and keeps hold of Kelly as they stand and listen to the woman explain what will happen in the near future as the hangar is investigated, cleared, and closed.

Within forty minutes, Brian Smith and Ann Locke formally sign the end of their contracts with Marthgate Hangar and turn in their official badges. Kelly, being a far better actor than Bradford, is the one to let their plans slip to one of her coworkers, which will explain why they won’t be reapplying for their contracts when the hangar eventually reopens. They run a brief gauntlet of well-wishers and sour looks — those who won and lost money in the lunch room bet — and are back on the tram heading to Bradford’s apartment within the hour.

It takes them less than an hour to strip Bradford’s apartment of anything useful, and they don’t run into Nettles in the hallways as they both half-expected. From there, it’s another ten minutes on a tram to reach Kelly’s apartment, and barely a half hour is spent there before they have packed everything that needs to leave the city center with them. By lunchtime, contrary to what they’d told their coworkers, they’re not standing in front of officials formally cementing their partnership: instead, they’re sitting on a high-speed train bound for the West Coast.

Two days later, they hop off the back of a truck six miles from Esperanza at about four in the morning. By breakfast time, they’ve made the trek in from the main road and have been cleared at the chain-link gate and sentry post up in Esperanza. They’re invited to join the settlement for breakfast, so they have a brief rest trading stories with Ricardo and his team before they again gather their things and head down into the canyon towards the Avenger.

“Well,” Bradford says, coming around the last winding corner on the canyon floor. A grin spreads across his face. “Look at that.”

The Speaker’s VIP-modified Skyranger is set down on the Avenger’s aft landing pad, gleaming and perfect in the early morning sunshine.

“Not bad,” Kelly says with a smile of her own, coming to a halt at his side. She gazes at the Skyranger in satisfaction for a long moment, and then looks up at him. “We did a good job, Central. It was a decent mission.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, still looking at all the possibilities the Skyranger represents for XCOM. He tears his eyes away from the gleaming transport, and looks directly at her. She’s still wearing civilian clothes — they both are, actually — and she has a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She should look out of place in the sand and dust of the desert, but instead he finds her presence beside him natural, almost expected. “You made for a good partner,” he tells her, and adds, a bit surprised by the observation, “We made a good team.”

She laughs. “We did, actually,” she says, sounding pleased, and starts forward again with him when he turns his steps toward the Avenger’s aft hatch.

He almost — almost — reaches to take her hand in his. Habits, he thinks ruefully as he covers up the aborted motion by adjusting his pack’s straps instead, are just as hard to break as they are to make.

They’re welcomed back as victorious heroes by everyone in the Avenger, and Firebrand — real name Angela Mercer — shares her story of her escape with the Skyranger. Shen shows how they had spent hours figuring out how to override the numerous biometric locks keeping the Skyranger’s passenger section secure before they’d been able to crack into the Skyranger’s main compartment, which at least makes Bradford feel a bit better about not being able to manage it in the field. 

“It means,” Dr. Tygan tells them somberly, “that the Speaker is not wholly human. And while I’m afraid we’ve suspected that for some time, it is still… disconcerting to have those suspicions confirmed.”

Still, it’s a far more triumphant end to the mission than any expected, made even better when Bradford passes back a thick envelope of identification papers to Santiago a day later. “These are still good,” he tells the supply team leader with justifiable pride. “There’s a few changes to make if you want to keep them active, but I think it’ll probably be worth the effort.”

Santiago’s eyes light. “Yes, yes,” he agrees easily, eagerly collecting the paperwork from Bradford. “Yours was good cover, too good to lose. I can keep both active — what to change?”

“Well,” Bradford says, more amused than embarrassed now that the whole thing is behind them, “you’d better mark them down as married, for one.”


	11. 03-01: Acquiring Positions

# Acquisitions

## Section 3: Winning the Past

### Chapter 1: Acquiring Positions

Operation Gatecrasher has the potential to kill XCOM.

There is too much at stake for it to be anything but polarizing. Either the mission is a success, and they gain the edge XCOM needs to start clawing its way back to prominence, or they’ll spend their best people and what little remains of their resources on a futile attempt at making a difference. 

If this mission fails, XCOM fails with it. Bradford likes to think that even then some form of it will live on: the Avenger will remain, after all, and Shen and Tygan and Marquez could reach out through Esperanza and the remaining settlements to attempt to rebuild. But if Operation Gatecrasher doesn’t succeed, the cost will be too high for XCOM to truly recover. They’ll lose the Skyranger and their only good pilot; they’ll lose Marquez’s whole squad of well-trained recruits; they’ll lose their only remaining undercover operative; they’ll lose Bradford himself. Any one of those losses could be fatal for such a small organization as XCOM — to lose them all at once means that recovery just won’t be possible.

Everyone knows that this is their last desperate chance, their one final shot at turning XCOM into something more like what it had been twenty years ago instead of the fragmented and dying resistance it’s become. 

Bradford’s not entirely sure it will all be worth it. He tries to figure their odds when he sits alone in his room after evening briefings wishing for a bottle, but he knows the odds are probably low. He torments himself with guesses. A one in twenty chance of success? One in a hundred?

Operation Gatecrasher is a desperate and ambitious plan cobbled together by an XCOM that knows it can’t afford to lose. 

It doesn’t seem real until he heads across Deck 6 to the barracks, to see Jane Kelly off.

At this point, she’s one of the most senior field operatives in XCOM: Marquez has of course been with XCOM longer, and so has Osei by a bare handful of months, but she’s seen more service in the field than both of them combined these last five years. Bradford himself can attest to her skill and devotion to the cause: Vahlen might have sent her over from Europe just to help claim the Avenger, but Kelly has since turned into one of the best field operatives the modern XCOM has ever boasted.

She’s come a long ways from the independent lone wolf she’d been five years ago: she’s more disciplined now, more used to working with a team and with looking out for soldiers and operatives who don’t have quite the same amount of pragmatism her years in the field have granted her. She can carry weaker operatives and less experienced soldiers, using her skills to guide them through operations, and she’s learned enough of leadership that he’s trusted her to run teams out in the field. There’s a reason, Bradford thinks as he approaches the center couch where she’s checking through her bag in the barracks, that she’s the only one of their operatives still living. Kelly is reliably very good at what she does, and because of that, they have a chance at pulling this off.

Bradford has trusted his life to her more than once, and he’s worked with her in the field dozens of times over the past five years. Because of that, ever since working so closely with her years ago stealing the Skyranger, he has had no problem speaking to her as an equal rather than as a subordinate, even though he technically outranks her in XCOM’s admittedly loose hierarchy. “Ready to head out?” he asks her as he steps up to the couch.

She looks up at his approach, and gives him a half-smile back. “As I’ll ever be, I suppose,” she says. 

Kelly doesn’t sound Irish anymore, though her accent was always faint. Instead, there’s a hint of the Midwest in her voice now, the basic American accent he grew up with. It’s the legacy, Bradford supposes, of spending so much time in various city centers around the Americas. She’s as much as admitted that she’s patterned her vocal habits after his to better blend in; he’d spent several evenings on one of their more boring missions in Colombia patiently reciting words for her and helping her learn to correct old inflections that would give away her origin in Ireland. Bradford misses the slight lilt to her words sometimes, when she uses a word he knows she struggled to pronounce in an American accent rather than Irish English.

“I’ll be just a few days after you,” he tells her, and hands her the envelope with her identification in it. Santiago has been dead for a year, but there is still his careful writing slanted across the top of the white paper: Ann Locke, it reads, though now the Locke has been crossed out and the name on the envelope has been corrected to Ann Smith. “Think you can put up with me for another few months?”

Her smile is at once wry and understanding. “I suppose we can manage,” she says.

Santiago died a year ago, and with him went their connections to the few black market forgers able to produce believable false identifications, the ones able to withstand the increased scrutiny ADVENT is paying to identification markers nowadays. It means the old covers that Santiago created and meticulously maintained are near priceless, and worth preserving. Bradford has precious few covers, and only one left that’s still any kind of decent: Brian Smith. It’s complete luck that Smith’s identification won’t expire for another five months, and only Kelly’s general paranoia that has kept her own Ann Smith persona ready to reactivate with him. 

Sheer luck, Bradford thinks rather uneasily, isn’t what he wants to gamble XCOM’s future on, but there’s no other choice but to accept it. 

“At least there won’t be any nosy neighbors this time,” he offers, and her grin spreads.

“Or coworkers placing bets,” she agrees. 

He does laugh at that, briefly, because they’ll be too busy for work this time around. They’ve very carefully updated Brian and Ann Smith’s covers and backgrounds — they’re supposedly new to the city center, another move after their prior employer was bought out, and both once more looking for employment. It means they won’t have close, regular contact with anyone; their covers are mostly in place for the computer records and the ADVENT-required checkpoints that have spread throughout the city like a virus. There won’t be regular people to fool this time around: there will be no need for the roleplay or for the general trappings of a relationship that had been required the last time they had stepped into these covers.

They’ll be sharing the same apartment, yes, but they’ve shared apartments and barracks before. There will probably be a certain amount of physical touch necessary, if only to fool the other people who dwell in their building; some form of publicly displayed affection is all but required. But it won’t be as bad as the last time they played these roles, and they’re both adult and professional enough about it to find that amusing rather than embarrassing.

“It can’t be any worse,” Bradford says. “I’ll be a week, maybe ten days behind you. I need to get Osei set up, and work with the others to get another squad leader.”

Osei will lead the support team — Bradford’s fairly sure he’ll pick Ramirez as his partner, which means he’ll need to have Marquez work on getting another soldier up to speed to lead the distraction team. Just the thought of it gives him a headache; he wishes he had more dependable soldiers rather than just unproven rookies to carry such a weight as the success of this all-or-nothing mission.

Kelly gives him a sympathetic look. “I’d go with Kleiner,” she says. “He’s quiet, but he’s observant. I think he’s got potential.”

Her recommendation is worth considering; Bradford nods. They’re silent for a moment as she finishes sorting her pack; Bradford’s not entirely sure why he hasn’t said his farewell and moved on, but it feels impolite to leave the barracks before she’s ready to head out towards what might be XCOM’s last mission. 

Abruptly, she looks up from organizing her gear. “So tell me the truth, Central,” she says. Kelly’s eyes are steady, her voice even. “Is he worth it?”

He greatly values the fact that she is one of the few members of XCOM willing to ask him such a blunt and potentially offensive question. Bradford doesn’t pretend to misunderstand her. “Yes,” he says, without a second of hesitation.

Her lips — lips he’s kissed, he reminds himself, and will probably kiss again for this mission — twitch. He’s not sure if it’s amusement or thoughtfulness that cause them to draw up at one corner. “Why?” she asks plainly. 

That question from someone else’s mouth might have sounded accusing, or even belligerent. But from Kelly he hears only honest curiosity, a desire to understand why his response is so certain. Bradford considers her for a moment, and then moves to sit beside her on the couch. Looking at where her thin hands rest on her pack, he says, “Because we only ever won when he was leading us. I can keep us going — I’m decent at keeping XCOM running, at keeping it alive — but if we ever want to actually make a difference, to fight back and have it mean something and have a chance at winning, then we need the Commander.”

Her laugh is quiet. “He has a name, you know,” Kelly points out. “I looked it up. It’s in his files. He’s —”

Bradford interrupts her before she can say it. “He’s the Commander,” he says firmly, and he can see the echo of surprise in Kelly’s eyes when he turns to face her. He grimaces, a bit embarrassed by his outburst, and attempts to find words to explain his insistence on using the man’s title rather than his name. 

“It was kind of a thing, back in the original XCOM,” he explains after a moment. “Whenever someone proved themselves out in the field, the Commander would start referring to them by little nicknames he’d give them, call-signs and code names. It kept their real identities off the radio, and it made everyone a little more equal. It was easier, too,” he recalls, “to use call-signs instead of trying to figure out rank equivalencies between all the different countries we had joined up with us back then. It made everyone feel like they belonged — you knew you were a part of XCOM when the Commander stopped calling you by your real name and started calling you by whatever nickname he assigned you. So once it became a thing, we all just started calling him Commander right back.”

Kelly tilts her head, considering. “Central,” she says, with a bit of satisfaction, as though his call-sign is a puzzle she’s finally solved.

He’s too old to flush, but heat creeps up his collar all the same. He shakes it off. “Something like that,” he mutters, and it strikes him suddenly that she’s never once called him by his actual name, only by his call-sign. It must be intentional on her part, he thinks, because if she dug through the old XCOM records enough to learn the Commander’s actual name, then she surely also discovered his.

Kelly regards him carefully, and then asks thoughtfully, “What made him so special?” 

Bradford stares at her, and before he can begin to reply, she gestures around them. “I mean, you’ve done fairly well with what’s left, obviously, but Marquez talks about him like he was the only reason XCOM existed.”

Bradford snorts. “Well, he was, pretty much,” he tells her. He leans back, at ease in her presence enough to stretch his arm out along the back of the couch out of habit. He’s not sitting close enough to her to need to worry about putting it behind her shoulders, and he’s comfortable enough with her proximity that the brush of his fingertips against her arm as he finishes settling back is not worth noticing. “He was a tactical genius. I mean it,” he adds, when he sees how skeptical she is of that statement. “He could look at the board and figure out where we needed to be and when — who to send where. We didn’t lose a single battle while he was in charge — every operation, for months, was perfect. The aliens had to turn to EXALT just to get plants into XCOM so they could take him out. The reports we got back then said he’d set their invasion plans back by more than two years, just from what he managed in those early months.”

“So they destroyed the first XCOM just to get to him,” Kelly realizes. “They wanted him that badly?”

“Apparently.” Bradford shakes his head. “I thought he was dead,” he murmurs. “I thought that was the whole point — to kill him and wreck whatever chance we had at stopping their invasion. Now, though — well, I’ve been double-guessing myself since the intel about that storage facility came in.”

Kelly leans back next to him on the couch, at home being casual beside him in a way very few others in XCOM are. It’s a nice feeling, to have at least one person refuse to treat him as an omniscient officer at all times. He’s not sure if her ease with him was born of her own independence or of when she’d worked so closely with him three years ago to steal the Skyranger; either way, he appreciates it.

“Why keep him alive for twenty years, though?” she wonders, clearly considering everything he’s told her. “There’s got to be a reason for it. ADVENT doesn’t just keep their enemies in stasis out of nostalgia. Why him, why for twenty years? What are they getting out of it?”

“I don’t know.” And he doesn’t: that’s the problem. There’s no good reason he can think of for the Commander to be kept sealed away in a stasis tube, quietly hidden from the rest of the world, for twenty years. “The smartest thing to do would have been to kill him. I have no idea what they’ve kept him around for.”

Kelly’s face twists in thought. “Those reports from Shen indicated it was a big power drain against the grid,” she points out. “Data-mining, maybe? Dr. Tygan said they’ve got some pretty frightening implants that can trawl through memories and subconscious stuff nowadays.”

Bradford snorts. “That’s not a comforting thought,” he says, but considers it. “Maybe. Either way, whatever they’re keeping him for, we need to get him back.”

Her laugh is low and short. “That’s the plan, isn’t it?” And Kelly pushes herself off the couch to her feet. “Jacques says he’s secured a decent apartment for us — not the best building, he says, but a fairly nice place otherwise. I’ll set up everything we need and start scoping out drop points and patrol habits, but what with Unification Day coming up, it’s going to be hard to find anyplace safe and unnoticed near the facility. It’s going to take some time to get things into place.”

He nods, and rises with her. “I’ll be a week, maybe ten days behind you,” he says again, and takes her hand when she offers it for a shake. It feels businesslike and impersonal compared to the fact that he’s going to be masquerading as her husband for the next two and a half months. “Send off a message if there’s anything missing when you get there, and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Fair enough,” she agrees, and gives him a small smile. “I’ll see you around, Central.”

He gives her a faint grin back, and she collects her pack and heads out the living area towards the stern of the ship. 

She’s the first moving part of the mission, and she’s been put into play: things are rolling now, and there’s no good way to stop them. XCOM is officially committed to rescuing the Commander from the moment Kelly leaves Esperanza on a transport truck heading for the city center that grew out of the sprawl of what had once been southern California.

A change comes over the Avenger once she is gone: it’s quieter, more somber, more focused. Conversations are brief, and there’s less laughter in the mess hall. It’s always this way before a mission, Bradford knows, but this time the silence feels more oppressive. It’s a weighty thing, to prepare for what could be the end of everything, and that tense truth drifts into place over the Avenger’s inhabitants and can’t be shaken off.

He spends time with Marquez, working with Osei and Ramirez to nail down their mission parameters, observing Kleiner as Kelly recommended and finally passing on his own advice to turn the German into the distraction squad’s team leader. He works with Dr. Tygan, studying the power draws of Facility 4234A, attempting to predict what medical equipment might be required for a man emerging from twenty years of stasis. In general, he pretends like this whole mission is going to be a rousing success.

Bradford lets himself consider contingency plans when he works with Shen, but then he’s known her longer and they’ve been through more together. He’s patient with her while she nervously learns the radio protocol for directing teams on the ground from him. He has no doubt at all that she can handle the duty: she might not be a soldier herself, but she’s good at seeing all the parts of the larger whole, and for a single mission with their best people in play, that will be all that’s needed.

He doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s worried. Too many things about this mission depends on luck. So much of this mission is only possible because of sheer coincidence, and he can’t help but feel that they’re all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s been pure chance since the very beginning: it had been completely accidental how the Spokesman had gained access to the intelligence about Facility 4234A in the first place. 

But their luck has held so far, for all Bradford mistrusts it. He can’t even begin to count the sheer amount of outright good fortune involved in setting up for Operation Gatecrasher.

Marquez has a team of six more or less unproven recruits who he has deemed well-trained enough to act as support for a mission, which meant they can manage to field both an extraction team and a distraction team. Shen has the Avenger’s systems finally mapped out, and she swears that they just needed a single piece more before they can put XCOM into the sky. Bradford still has one solid cover that still active, and Kelly’s joint cover is in good shape as well. Moreover, Kelly had been back from South America already when the Spokesman’s information had come in. She’d been sunburned and annoyed at her lack of Spanish, but willing and eager to go back into the field for such an important mission. There hadn’t been any need to delay the mission waiting for her to be recalled from some distant site.

Facility 4234A is in what had once been Southern California, a mere two hours northwest of them as the Skyranger flies: well within the Skyranger’s safety radius in terms of fuel, and inside the Skyranger’s capabilities for a covert approach. Firebrand can insert two teams, lay low, and reappear for a quick extraction afterward without worrying about fuel limits or flight ranges or quick pursuit. Assuming everything goes perfectly, they’ve calculated out that once the mission begins, they can extract everyone involved — including, obviously, the Commander — and retreat back to the Avenger in as little as a hundred and thirty minutes.

Bradford isn’t a superstitious man, but he’s uncomfortably aware of how perfectly everything has so far fallen into place. Random chance is possible, yes, but he’s been trained to be suspicious, and he’s wary of a ruse. If seems too good to be true, his bitter mind often reminds him, it’s usually a trap. Everything has gone exactly according to plan, and that alone is worrisome.

Their luck has held so far, but he knows even luck can’t last forever.

It’s almost a relief when something goes wrong, because he’s more used to setbacks than successes. But the bad news comes sooner than he expected, before he even leaves the Avenger to join Kelly in the city center.

He’s alone in his room when his mobile sounds. It takes him a minute to process the quiet chirping noise: it’s not a mobile he’s used in years, and it’s pure chance that he’d been thinking ahead enough to have the thing charging on the little shelf above his cramped desk. Very few people know the number for the mobile and none of them would use it lightly, so Bradford grabs at the thing and unlocks it on the second try. Kelly, he thinks, or a check on his cover; he taps open the display to see an alert blinking at him, and he opens it.

The words that scrawl across the text-only display are chilling.

 _Message for Smith, Brian Jacob,_ the text reads. _This is a next-of-kin notification for Smith, Ann Locke. Smith, Ann Locke has been accepted as a patient at Skyview Medical Center. Smith, Ann Locke is currently listed as status: critical. Next-of-kin Smith, Brian Jacob is requested to contact Skyview Medical with all haste._

Bradford’s blood runs cold. He slaps the intercom panel. “Shen,” he bellows, lurching up to his feet. “We’ve got a problem!”

It’s not that late — barely past nine o’clock — so her voice is remarkably prompt, though he knows he’s disrupted what is technically her off-duty hours. “Go ahead, Central,” she says, and then, more urgently, “What is it?”

“Kelly’s been hospitalized,” he barks at the intercom. “I got an alert from a Skyview Medical — she’s been admitted in critical condition. We’ll need to move up my timetable, and we need to figure out what the hell happened and if this is a trap.”

He hears Shen’s sharp intake of breath — Shen and Kelly are somehow decent friends, for all Kelly’s older than the chief engineer and rarely in the Avenger to see her. “Right,” Shen says, and he can hear the clatter of a keyboard. “On it, Central.”

Bradford turns away from the intercom and stares at his small quarters. He’s half-packed to start the undercover assignment as it is; he finishes the task in a bare ten minutes, flinging everything necessary into his duffel bag and digging out the correct identification papers. His intercom crackles to life just as he’s hauling his usual shirt off over his head to change into the civilian clothes Brian Smith would wear.

“Good news and bad news, Central,” Shen says, and doesn’t bother to ask which he wants to hear first. “Bad news: she is actually in the hospital, listed as critical — she’s in emergency surgery right now. Good news: her cover looks like it’s holding, and…” Her tone shifts, turns baffled and amazed. “Well, you’re not going to believe this, but ADVENT stormed her apartment building and got into a firefight with a resistance cell. Not one of ours,” she’s quick to add, “no one’s ever heard of them, so just a homebrew resistance cell is my guess, but it looks like she got caught in the crossfire. There were a few explosions.”

Bradford yanks on a pair of black slacks. “And she didn’t have any warning they were coming?” he asks, because that’s the part of the scenario he can concentrate on. 

“I don’t know,” Shen admits. “I can’t ping her tablet or her mobile, at least, and her wall console looks like it got fried from the security footage I’ve found. It — well, I saw them haul her out of there, Central. She didn’t look conscious.”

“She’d have destroyed anything incriminating if she had any kind of notice,” Bradford says, well aware of Kelly’s quick reaction time and unwilling to focus on the idea of her unconscious. “If she’d even had two minutes of warning, they won’t find a thing out of place in that apartment.”

“In what’s left of it,” Shen responds dubiously. “Really, Central, the apartment is kind of… gone.”

He shuts his eyes, and inhales a long breath. He refuses to think about what that kind of damage would do to the woman in the apartment. “So it’s not a trap,” he says on his exhale. “And I’ve got to get myself to Skyview Medical to keep our covers in line.”

“Right,” she agrees. “I’ve got Firebrand doing preflights on the Skyranger — we can’t set you down inside the city center, but there’s a mag-rail line heading west from Tuscon — well, what was basically Tuscon — and we can get you dropped off near the mag-line without raising too much attention. All told, it’ll take you six hours to get there.”

Six hours is about five and a half hours longer than Bradford would like, but he knows it’s the best they can do. “I’m ready whenever Firebrand is,” he says. “Thanks, Shen. I’ll keep you posted once I’m in place.”

“I’ll monitor the hospital records,” she tells him. “Keep your mobile on you, and I’ll keep you updated.”

He throws his duffel bag over his shoulder and stomps into the living quarters for the rest of the soldiers, most of whom are still awake. He has a quick and forceful conversation with Marquez before he leaves. Marquez is as reliable as daylight: he nods at every order Bradford gives, promises to update him whenever they reestablish communication, and doesn’t flinch when he shakes Bradford’s hand what might be a final time in goodbye.

Shen’s as good as her word, and keeps him up-to-date as he travels west towards Kelly. _Status still listed as critical,_ she sends him just before he ducks out of the Skyranger to start his journey into the city center around Tuscon.

He frowns down at his mobile, and punches in the order to make it call Skyview Medical once he’s on board the high-speed train heading west.

It takes a frustratingly long time for him to be directed to the correct ward, and there’s a terrifying minute when they ask for his identification number and he can’t find the right paperwork to read it off. But they’re used to frantic relatives and distraught spouses, and thankfully interpret his ineptness for panic; the fact that it takes him longer than it should to remember his identification number is kindly excused in light of the fact that his wife is in surgery. Instead, once his identity is verified, he’s informed that Ann Smith was brought to the medical center in critical condition around 1900, and that she’s in emergency surgery at the moment to repair various injuries. Bradford listens to the catalog of broken bones and internal bleeding with a soldier’s experience, and comes to the grim conclusion that she’d likely been caught in the shock wave from one of ADVENT’s more powerful explosives. There are no bullet wounds, no burns, no blown-off limbs, just what sounds like a great deal of injury from being physically thrown from one end of her apartment to the other. Battered, bruised, and broken, he thinks: still critical condition, but within the range of full recovery if modern medicine has its way.

He tells the medical center that he’s inbound on the fastest train he can find, and he’s given instructions for where to report when he does arrive. Then there’s nothing to do but sit on the train and stew. He tries not to wonder at her status, at the extent of the injuries the medical tech had attempted to quickly gloss over. He tries not to think about the data and supplies lost in the destroyed apartment, or whether Kelly will be able to recover in time to be any kind of useful to the mission, or if the mission can proceed without her.

He tries not to consider which he’s more worried about: if she’ll recover in time, or if she’ll recover.

 _Out of surgery, status listed as critical but stable,_ Shen tells him four hours later as the train is just starting to slide into the fringes of the final city center. Bradford clears the message with a relieved huff of air, and double-checks his route on the smaller, local trams to the medical center.

Just before he gets to the medical center, there’s a final text. _Still critical but stable, _Shen informs him, _and the night nurse reports she’s not conscious yet.___

__Bradford frowns, hitches his duffel bag higher on his shoulder, and strides into the darkened entry lobby of Skyview._ _


	12. 03-02: Acquiring an Ally

# Acquisitions

## Section 3: Winning the Past

### Chapter 2: Acquiring an Ally

Realistically, their luck had to run out sometime.

Bradford knows this, but it doesn’t make his anger any easier to deal with. “I told you,” he says with gritted teeth. “This is the only ID I have with me. My apartment was blown up — I can’t just go back and get a different one.”

“I’m really very sorry, sir,” the young man behind the counter says apologetically. “But I’m afraid this ID is no longer valid for third-level facilities, and medical centers and gene therapies have been reclassified as third-level facilities just this past week. Without a more recent identification card, I’m afraid I can’t allow you entry.”

The fresh-faced and very earnest young man is technically the third manager in a chain of managers that Bradford has dealt with in the past two hours. It’s close to six in the morning: he’s tired, frustrated, and only holding things together so well because losing his temper is a sure way to get himself thrown out of the medical center completely.

“My more recent identification cards,” he repeats for the fifth time, very slowly, “were _destroyed_ , in the same explosion that leveled my apartment. Which is the reason why my wife is here in critical condition. I have no other ID card to give you.”

“I understand,” the manager says politely, but he holds to his party line. “And it’s very unfortunate, but there’s nothing I can do. A temporary identification card can be acquired at any ADVENT screening site — that may be your best option.”

Bradford is not entirely certain Brian Smith’s identification is up to a full investigation at an ADVENT screening site. So instead, he gives the manager a withering look, taking full advantage of his age and intimidating appearance in an attempt to simply frighten the younger man into compliance. “Remind me again,” he says, crossing his arms, “how long it takes to get this temporary ID.”

“Ah.” And the blond man has the grace to look chagrined, and for the first time, he wavers a little. “No longer than a week, I’m told.”

Bradford glares, and has at least the satisfaction of watching the manager visibly wilt under the strength of it. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t consider that a valid option while my wife is in critical condition somewhere upstairs,” he says caustically, and he’s about to launch into what will surely be a far less polite demand than before when the lobby doors behind him slide open.

People have been coming and going from those doors for the past few hours — mostly people visiting patients or medical center staff arriving for early morning shifts. Bradford has more or less ignored all of them, and so has whoever he’s been speaking with. But this time, when the doors open, the manager’s eyes flicker past Bradford, and the man goes pale. “Ah, Mr. Smith,” he says, and he reaches up to take Bradford’s arm. “Perhaps we ought to take this discussion elsewhere. Skyview is expecting a guest of honor, and —”

“Brian Smith?” a smooth, almost-familiar voice asks in astonishment.

Bradford has a moment of utter panic — this is it, their luck has finally run out; he’s about to be discovered for who he is, and he and Kelly and XCOM are all probably going to be dead because of it — and then he instantly shuts down his emotions. Coolly, locked down and on edge, ready to do whatever it takes, he turns to face this new threat.

He sees the ADVENT soldiers first: two of them, basic troopers in their face-shielding helmets and shining dark plates of body armor. They’re carrying rifles, and he thinks he can made out grenades at their belts; the radios built into their helmets are more worrisome for the reinforcements they can call.

Bradford’s still-crossed arms tense, so he deliberately loosens them, dropping them to his sides to give himself a better range of movement. He’s unarmed, and it’s two versus one — but he’s managed worse odds.

Then, “My God,” that almost-familiar voice continues, clearly surprised. “I haven’t seen you in years.”

His gaze slides past the soldiers, and comes to a stunned halt on perhaps the person he least expected to see.

It takes him a moment to remember her name — he hates undercover assignments, and remembering who knows what about which version of himself. But he remembers the woman standing behind the soldiers: he remembers her neat white pantsuits, the way her blonde hair is carefully coiffed in perfect strict waves around her head, the almost rhythmic cadence to her voice.

“Rachel Nettles,” he finally recalls, and he doesn’t need to act at all in order to sound baffled. “What the hell are _you_ doing here?”

Her heels click briskly against the floor as she crosses the lobby to hold out a hand in greeting. “Oh, it’s for my latest novel,” she says, as though that explains why she’s at a hospital at close to six in the morning. Her honor guard drift behind her and come to a stop, clearly sizing Bradford up but not making any motion to attack. “What are you doing here?” She comes to a stop beside him, takes his hand for a warm shake, and looks him up and down. Then a look of horror crosses her face. “Where’s Ann? Is Ann all right? Her last comm said you were closing up your old apartment and wouldn’t be out to join her here for another few weeks.”

This is either the best idea Bradford’s had in years or stupidest. 

He takes a deep breath, doesn’t think about how their luck is starting to fail, and explains curtly, “ADVENT took out a terrorist cell last night — our apartment got caught in the blast. Ann was home and was injured. They brought her here for surgery. But,” and he glares again at the polite young manager in front of him, “I haven’t updated my identification yet after those new third-level facility rules went into place, and every other ID card I had got blown up. And these _idiots_ won’t let me up to see her because my ID doesn’t meet the new standards.”

Nettles’s carefully made-up face twists as he talks, until at the end even years of excellent plastic surgery can’t hide the derision clearly displayed in her expression. The glare she levels at the young manager is scathing, and Bradford is impressed despite himself. “That’s absolutely ridiculous,” she snaps. “You can’t make a single exception for an EXALT veteran, even when his wife is critically wounded? What kind of madness is this?”

“Ms. Nettles,” the manager says desperately, throat bobbing. “We’re very pleased to welcome you to Skyview Medical Center.”

“Yes, yes,” she says impatiently, and she jabs one long finger at the manager — the pointed, red-painted nail waves a bare inch from his face. “Here. I have a level-five clearance, and I can vouch for Mr. Smith right now. Will that be enough to get him in to see his wife?”

“Oh.” The manager looks mortified, as though he’d like to sink into the ground. “Oh yes, ma’am, if you’re level-five, and if you can personally —”

“Yes, yes,” she says again, and gestures at one of her honor guard. The trooper steps up, arm outstretched, and Bradford almost jolts back from it before he realizes the man is just offering out a plastic identification card for the manager’s inspection. “Personal verification — of course I know him. His name is Brian Smith and he served with EXALT back in the arrival days. His wife’s name is Ann, Ann Locke, and they’ve been married — what, four years now?”

“Three,” he corrects faintly, impressed with watching her bulldoze over the manager.

“Three,” she repeats, and glares again at the medical center manager. “There — I’ve vouched for him. Get him up to see his wife, will you?” And without looking to see if she’s obeyed or not, she turns back to Bradford. “I’ll be occupied for a few hours, but I’ll come to see you both before I leave, if that’s all right.”

Bradford nods, and offers his hand to her in real gratitude this time. “I appreciate it,” he tells her. “More than you can imagine.” Which, he thinks sourly, is at least completely true.

She takes his hand in both of hers, grips it. “It’ll be all right,” she consoles him. “Skyview is one of the preeminent medical centers in this whole section — Ann’s in good hands here.”

“Ah, here you are, Mr. Smith,” the manager says meekly, offering a red-tinged visitor’s pass. “Mrs. Smith is on level twenty-two, ward three, room six.”

“I’ll visit when I’m done,” Nettles assures him, and then steps back. “Give Ann my best. I’m sure all will be well.”

She sweeps forward, flanked by her two guards, and disappears down a side passage leading left from the lobby. Bradford stays where he is, watching her go, and doesn’t realize until the man beside him speaks that the manager hadn’t left with her. “She’s amazing,” the manager says, in something like hero-worship. “She’s using Skyview as the setting for her next novel — you know, the EXALT Arrival Series? She received special permission to work with us, and because of the book, the Speaker’s going to make a special visit here when he comes to the city center for Unification Day.” And with more respect than before, he looks at Bradford. “You were EXALT? How do you know her?”

“We were neighbors,” Bradford answers curtly, unwilling to go into the details the younger man clearly craves. He lifts the red-colored pass. “I’m good to go?”

“Oh, yes, sir — she’s personally exempted you.” The manager looks even more apologetic than before. “I’d still put in for a temporary ID when you can, Mr. Smith; this new reclassification has been causing trouble for everyone.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Bradford mutters, and heads for the elevators. 

Even being blessed with a red-tinted pass — which, he discovers on the twenty-second floor, entitles him to a level-four clearance release — it takes Bradford almost an hour before he can actually get in to see Kelly. He’s taken aside by a team of two nurses, who give him a fairly honest assessment of her condition and of what’s been done to her.

His guesses on the train were right: Kelly was neither shot nor directly hit by the explosives. Instead, when the explosions took out the apartment above her, she was caught in the blast. The shockwave propelled her — along with most of their apartment — some twenty feet, through one wall and hard up against another. The nurses are quick to assure her that emergency personnel reached her swiftly, and that she was stabilized and evacuated within minutes, but her list of injuries is long. Cracked and broken ribs, two broken bones in her forearm, injuries to her head and swelling of her brain, lacerated internal organs, a punctured lung, and a great deal of internal bleeding: it’s not the worst injury list Bradford’s ever seen, but only because he’s been a soldier for most of his life.

It’s the worst Kelly’s ever been hurt, he thinks, trying to remember if she’s ever mentioned being hospitalized or badly wounded before. He knows she’d broken an arm on an earlier mission, and he’s always suspected she actually had broken her ankle and refused to admit it on the disastrous mission in Bolivia two years ago, but she’s survived XCOM remarkably unscathed so far. It’s a shame to have that successful streak broken by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The nurses caution him that she’s still hooked up to quite a bit of medical equipment, and that she hasn’t awoken from the surgery yet. “But that’s not unusual,” the older nurse explains briskly. “And in fact, the longer she’s asleep the faster she’ll heal. Modern medicine has made great strides thanks to the Elders.”

Still, when he’s finally allowed into the small sterile room where Kelly lies in a hospital bed, Bradford’s bracing himself for the worst.

He’s relieved not to find it. Kelly is unconscious, yes, and there’s an oxygen mask in place over the lower half of her face. IV lines are attached to her right arm; her left is swathed in what looks like metallic white lace, the modern version of the old plaster casts. She’s in a hospital gown, which remain unchanged as unflattering on everyone, and the nurses have drawn a light blanket up to her waist. There are quietly beeping monitors and consoles displaying vital signs lining the wall behind her.

She looks exhausted and unhappy, even in sleep, but she’s breathing. The hospital gown only emphasizes how small she is: she’s past forty now, but she’s still as thin and wiry as Bradford remembers her being five years ago when he first met her. He watches her breathe for a solid minute before he moves his eyes from the rise and fall of her chest to check on her official vitals. The heartbeat reflected on the screen over her head is steady. 

Bradford releases a long breath, and the tension he’s been carrying for the past nine hours finally begins to dissipate. He steps forward fully into the room, and hauls the guest chair over to the side of her bed. He sets his duffel down on the ground at his feet, and drops rather gracelessly into the chair at her side.

He doesn’t know what to say or do now that he’s here: she’s alive, her cover so far intact, and as such their mission hasn’t been compromised. But the mission will have to adapt to this — a new apartment, he thinks, and how the hell are they going to find something as well positioned as the old one had been so close to Unification Day? And Kelly herself will face physical therapy and the need to get back into combat readiness quickly, though he doesn’t doubt she’ll make it. Skyview is an excellent medical center, and the nurses had told him that she’d likely be fully recovered within a few weeks. It’s ridiculously quick compared to what Bradford’s used to — XCOM’s had to rely on pre-invasion hospitals and field medicine because real doctors work too closely with ADVENT to trust — but he doesn’t doubt them. Kelly might be back ready for her part in things quickly, but until then, they’ll have to adapt around their old plans.

“Hey,” he says after a long moment of silence. He leans forward and studies her face. There are bruises on her left temple, and nicks and cuts marring her forehead; her dark freckles stand out more than usual against her pale cheeks. Bradford can’t imagine being flung across an apartment, and winces in sympathy. “Hey, sweetheart,” he says again after a long moment. The endearment sticks in his throat, but he can’t very well call her by her real name here, and asleep or not, he dislikes calling her by her cover name. Still, on the off chance she can fake unconsciousness well enough to fool ADVENT’s best medical devices, he tells her, “I’m here. It’ll all be okay.”

There’s no response, so Bradford settles into the chair next to her. Despite ordering himself not to, he finds himself dozing at her side. It’s been a long and eventful night; his head nods, and he jerks awake only when the morning nurse comes in to attempt to quietly check Kelly’s vitals.

He heads down to the medical center’s cafeteria for breakfast while the nurse works, mostly because he hasn’t eaten since dinner the night before and not because he expects the food to be decent. It’s something to do while the nurse changes bandages and checks Kelly’s progress; the nurse had urged him out briskly, clearly used to shooing relatives away to manage the necessary morning tasks.

Bradford’s not sure what’s different about the room when he returns, but something seems changed. He drops his bag down beside the chair again, and takes his seat. After only a moment’s hesitation, he reaches out and very carefully takes Kelly’s right hand in his, cautiously avoiding the IV lines.

“Morning, sweetheart,” he says softly. “I’m back.”

Kelly’s eyes open immediately and she exhales a long, sharp breath. She looks straight up at Bradford, and he realizes how very tense she was before his words only when her whole body seems to melt back into the hospital bed as that tightness leeches out of her. To his surprise, tears gather in her eyes. She hauls in another sharp breath, trying to blink them back, before she shuts her eyes and clearly struggles not to cry.

He understands that kind of overwhelming relief, and doesn’t blame her for not quite being able to hold herself together upon the realization that she is safe. She was probably expecting ADVENT soldiers and alien interrogators, Bradford realizes. Instead, she got his scarred face and false endearments, and found both reassuring. He’s evidence she’s safe, he thinks, suddenly glad he can offer her that silent safety just by being present at her side. The fact that he’s here is the clearest sign he can give her that her cover is still intact and that XCOM won’t abandon her, that there’s still hope for the mission they’ve barely started. 

It’s proof, Bradford thinks fiercely, that she can depend on him to cover for her while she regains her strength, that she’s not alone and in pain behind enemy lines. He grips her hand tighter, and moves closer, abandoning the chair to lean over her. He smooths his free hand across her cheek to push back her hair. “Hey,” he says, doing his best to soothe her, uncomfortable with her tears even if he can sympathize with their cause. “It’s okay. It’s okay — everything’s going to be all right.”

The door swings open. “I saw her vitals shift,” a nurse starts, and he stops to smile at Kelly, who’s opened her watery eyes at the intrusion. “Oh! Excellent. Good morning, Mrs. Smith — let me help get you sitting up, and you’ll feel much better.”

The man is good at his job, and very kind. He prattles away the whole time he helps adjust Kelly’s bed to give her the chance to regain her composure with some dignity, and he manages to take quick looks at all her vitals and check her pulse discreetly as he helps remove the oxygen mask so that she can talk. “There,” he announces, disconnecting tubes from the tower beside her. He beams at her as he pulls the mask away. “How are you feeling?”

Her voice sounds rusty and thin. “Fuzzy?” she offers as a reply. Her fingers are tight around Bradford’s hand. She’s not crying any more, though her eyes are red and tear tracks are drying on her cheeks. “What…?” And she looks to Bradford.

“What do you remember?” the nurse asks, adjusting something on her IV tower. 

Kelly’s gaze moves from Bradford to her left arm, where she stares in some wonder at the lacy cast covering her arm from fingertips to elbow. “I don’t know,” she says eventually, and though Bradford can read her tone well enough to recognize that as not the whole truth, the nurse shows no signs of picking up on her hesitation. “I was at the wall console, and then I wasn’t. I remember an explosion, I think? And a medical transport, maybe. But I don’t know what happened.”

“ADVENT raided the apartment above us,” Bradford tells her. “You got caught in the crossfire.”

Memory — awareness — flickers over her face. She’s not her usual self yet; instead of putting on a mask and reacting to that in character as Ann Smith, she simply shuts her eyes and lets her face drop to neutral. “Oh,” she says, and Bradford knows she remembers more and has more to tell him. He can’t ask her about it, not in an ADVENT-controlled hospital with the nurse next to them, but he squeezes her hand to let her know that he understands what she’s not saying.

“Hey,” he chides, trying to keep his tone gentle — like a lover, not like a commanding officer. “You’re all right, sweetheart. It’s all right.”

“What happened to me?” she asks, and then, a little stronger, “And the apartment?”

He grimaces. “Don’t think about the apartment,” he urges, and because he knows she’s probably worried about compromising data and gear left behind in the rubble, he adds, “There’s not much of anything left, and you’re what matters right now.”

Ann Smith wouldn’t necessarily find that statement particularly reassuring, but he sees the relief in Kelly’s eyes before she tucks it away. The nurse doesn’t notice that brief flicker. “As for you,” the nurse says briskly, “you had some blunt force trauma from the explosion’s shock wave. You’ve broken two ribs and cracked three more; your left arm has been broken in two places. You had a punctured lung that’s been dealt with and some tricky internal bleeding from a nick near your heart, but the surgeons have you all set to right again, and you’re going to be recovered before you know it.”

“How-” she starts, and she has to stop, swallow, and ask again, “How long was I out?”

“About twelve hours,” the nurse reassures her. “Which is perfectly normal, Mrs. Smith — the longer you sleep, the harder your body can work setting things to right. Between that and our medical care, you’ll be up and out of that bed before you know it.” He smiles at her, and finishes up at the console he was working it. “I’m going to have the surgeons come in and take a quick look at you, and we’ll want to get you started with some intensive treatments for your ribs. If all goes well, I’m sure you’ll be released in just another day or so.”

Bradford blinks at the nurse, impressed despite himself: it’s been so long since XCOM could risk real medical intervention that he sometimes forgets how many advancements have been made in the past twenty years. “That soon?” he asks, and only afterward remembers he’s supposed to be a concerned husband and not simply amazed by medical science. So he’s quick to amend his exclamation. “Are you sure she’ll be ready? I don’t want a relapse, or for her recovery to be set back…”

“We’ll leave it to the doctors,” the nurse says diplomatically. “I’ll send them in.”

There’s a parade of different doctors and surgeons and medical personnel over the next three hours. They check Kelly’s vitals, run machines over her chest, give her various injections Bradford can’t hope to pronounce, and in general seem very pleased with Kelly’s progress. 

It’s maddening, because Bradford can do nothing the entire time but sit there and attempt to look supportive. Even when there’s no other person in the room with them, he can’t tell Kelly what she clearly wants to know: that the mission isn’t compromised, that their covers aren’t blown, that this is a minor hurdle at best and a small delay at worst. He can see the guilt in her face, the worry, and if he wasn’t so damn sure this whole hospital was precisely monitored, he’d find some way to tell her that her concern was needless.

Instead, he sits or stands or is shuffled aside as various medical technicians see to Kelly, and he only speaks up when he can see the furrow of pain in her forehead growing deeper. She holds his hand, as much to preserve their covers as because she seems to need a way to keep herself grounded. Bradford can’t find it in himself to blame her, and moves his hand to cover hers whenever she twitches her fingers towards him, to keep her from having to lift her hand and tug on her IV line when she reaches for him.

It’s after lunch before they have their first moment of peace: Kelly’s already gone through one round of what the doctors call acceleration therapy on her ribs, and she’s breathing easier only an hour later because of it.

“The wonders of modern medicine,” Bradford murmurs, impressed despite himself, and she settles herself back against her pillows and gives him a wan smile.

“How did they track you down?” she asks, since they’re finally alone.

The truth is close enough to his cover that he can speak fairly freely. “The medical center sent out a next-of-kin alert,” he tells her, taking his seat beside her. It’s almost habit already to take her hand. “I got on the first train I could — sorry it took so long.”

“I was asleep anyway,” she murmurs, eyes clearing a little. Her thumb brushes along his palm. “I’m glad you came.”

There’s a response to that, he’s sure, but the dichotomy of what he should say pretending to be her husband and what he wants to say as her commanding officer is too wide. He’s at a loss for words, so he gives her a half-hearted smile, and is silent.

There’s a knock on the door, which breaks the awkward quiet, and they both look up as Rachel Nettles peeks her well-coiffed head into the room. “Do you have time for a visitor?” she asks softly.

“Sure,” Bradford says, and he says pointedly to Kelly, “I didn’t mention that I ran into an old friend downstairs, sweetheart.”

Nettles’s smile is wry as she steps into the room and comes to stand at the foot of Kelly’s bed. “I was glad to help out,” she says, and her polite smile fades for a second. “I was horrified to hear what happened to you, Ann,” she says. “It’s awful — dissidents, so close to home. And you had such a nice apartment, too.”

Kelly must be regaining her strength, because the little smile she gives Nettles is almost as strong as it should be. “We’ll find another one,” she says. “But it means I probably won’t be able to make that brunch we were planning for tomorrow.”

Bradford is impressed despite himself: of course Kelly had arranged to meet up with Nettles, he thinks, just to keep up their old covers. He knows that Kelly’s been communicating as Ann with Nettles for years — she’s occasionally kept him up-to-date on the letters and comms they’ve shared, just as a part of keeping Ann and Brian as active covers. He hadn’t known, as Kelly clearly had, that Nettles was in the same city center with them once more. She’d probably planned on telling him about Nettles when he arrived for the mission, if only to get their stories straight. Kelly’s largely outgrown her old lone wolf instincts, and it’s rare for her to forget to share information these days. He’s grateful she at least attempted to set the meeting for a time when he wasn’t in town and wouldn’t have to deal with Nettles himself.

Now Nettles shakes her head. “That’s not important now — how are you feeling? Are they taking good care of you?” 

Kelly reassures her that she’s recovering well, and Bradford interjects just enough to thank Nettles again for getting him clearance to see her. Nettles seems pleased with the thanks, and smooths nicely-manicured hands down the front of her white blouse. Then she asks, “When are they talking of releasing you?”

“Another day or so,” Bradford says.

Nettles nods, as though she expected that, and takes a breath. “If you don’t mind me asking,” she starts slowly, “what are your plans now that your apartment is gone?”

Kelly and Bradford exchange a speaking glance, and Bradford is the one to answer the question. “I don’t know,” he says. “We haven’t been in town long, and we hadn’t expected to need another place so quickly.”

“Well.” And Nettles shakes her head. “I’m sure ADVENT will offer you temporary housing, as this really is all their fault, but I’d like to offer you an alternative, if I may.” She takes another quick breath. “I ran your background, Brian — back when we first met. I hope you don’t mind,” she adds quickly. “I was curious about your service with EXALT. But I was thinking — your prior service with EXALT means you’re approved for up to level-four secure housing. I have a residence right now in a level-four building, and I have a guest room. You’re not likely to find any other place to rent until after Unification Day, not with the Speaker expected in town, so you’re welcome to spend the next few weeks in the guest room if you’d rather stay with me instead of in ADVENT’s emergency housing.”


	13. 03-03: Acquiring Habits

# Acquisitions

## Section 3: Winning the Past

### Chapter 3: Acquiring Habits

Kelly is in the hospital for another thirty-six hours, which isn’t much time for them to decide on a plan. They can’t speak freely, not with the omnipresent cameras and monitors lining the walls, and there always seems to be someone in the room with them checking on Kelly’s progress. So they do a great deal of coded conversation, which annoys them both as limited as it is, and Bradford spends his evenings in a nearby hotel doing what research he can. 

In the end, though, they take Nettles up on her offer.

It basically boils down to location: her building is two tram stops away from Elder Square, which is twelve stops closer than their next-best option and four stops closer than their prior apartment had been. 

It means, Bradford thinks, that they will spend the next two months under direct scrutiny from an intelligent if overly romantic woman who may have suspected them in the past, and that they will have to watch their words and actions more than they anticipated. It means that even in private, they won’t quite be able to escape the stories of their covers, and it means they will have to be very, very careful. Nettles clearly thought something was off about them three years ago, and even without discussing it, Bradford and Kelly share several speaking glances acknowledging that Nettles still seems to have something of that speculation in her eyes even now.

But she’s at least a known quantity, even if she’s problematic, and a level-four secure building is far better than they could have hoped for when planning the mission. Shen should be able to worm her sensors into the apartment without too much attention, and that means they should be able to rig at least the guest room for enough privacy to allow quick connections with the Avenger when the need arises. It means that they’ll be afforded bigger network and power draws, and that ADVENT themselves will be providing the building security.

They will be able to plan treason from the heart of ADVENT, and it’s too good a chance to pass up.

Still, it’s nerve-wracking to pass along their false identification for security scans and clearance validation. If they pass this final test, they’re in the clear for the next two months. But if it fails, they will have little warning and next to no other recourse: Kelly, at least, is physically trapped in the hospital until she’s released, and Bradford is reluctant to leave her to face capture and containment alone if something does go wrong.

So they gamble their lives on Santiago’s old skill at forging documents, and submit everything required to gain approval for becoming legal long-term guests in Nettles’s building. 

Their luck holds one last time, though, and on the day Kelly is released from the medical center, Nettles brings them their building passes. 

Bradford remembers living across the hall from Nettles, and is braced for more of what he recalls: questions about his time with EXALT and his jobs since then, pleasantries he can’t avoid, and probably more time spent with her than he’d like. But she proves to be a gracious and understanding hostess: she meets them at the tram station, ushers them to her building, takes them up to her apartment, and then shows them around the space with modest pride. It’s an excellent apartment, all things considered: filled with luxury touches, spacious and modern, obviously the benefit of being trusted by ADVENT and the new world order. The guest room is small, a second tiny bedroom across the living area from Nettles’s master bedroom, but it has its own bathroom, and there’s enough room for a single recliner to fit at the foot of the bed to make a sort of sitting area. 

“You’re welcome, of course, to share my kitchen and living room whenever you’d like,” Nettles assures them as they stand rather awkwardly in the doorway to the room. “I know it’s small, but I thought it would be better than ADVENT emergency housing.”

“It’s much better,” Kelly assures her. She’s still moving slowly, but she’s steady enough on her feet that she only leans on Bradford occasionally. He keeps close to her just in case, and doesn’t hesitate to reach out to stabilize her when he notices her start to tire. “And we really do appreciate this — it’s above and beyond anything you had to do for us, especially considering how long it’s been since we’ve seen each other.”

Nettles gives Kelly a smile that is somehow nervous. “Oh, well, I do like being helpful,” she says. “And I get lonely, sometimes, so it’ll be nice to have folks around again. Not that you have to spend all your time with me,” she’s quick to add, flushing, “but you know what I mean.”

She is gracious, understanding, and not nearly as inquisitive as Bradford remembers. Still, when she steps away from them and leaves Bradford standing with Kelly at the foot of the guest room bed, he looks down at Kelly with exasperation on his face and quirks a single eyebrow.

Kelly rolls her eyes in response, and they don’t need to speak another word to share their opinion on Nettles.

Still, as complications go, it’s not an awful one. It takes time, of course, to get set up in a new place. They’ve lost most of their possessions, and there’s something entirely surreal about using the ADVENT relief funds they were offered to replace clothing and tablets and minor personal items. The items they can’t possibly requisition through ADVENT are more worrisome losses: specialty technology and the beginnings of weapon and armor stashes that would have been used on Unification Day. It’ll take time to recover from the apartment’s destruction, but it’s not an insurmountable hurdle, just a logistical problem.

Bradford debates the situation with Kelly six days later, once they’ve managed to get news to Shen. It takes that long for Shen to work her way remotely through the various firewalls and security measures ADVENT has set up on the building’s network connections: it’s a level-four secure facility, after all, and even Shen can’t work miracles overnight. Still, in just less than a week, Shen’s hacked into the building and placed some kind of feedback loop over the guest room to bypass ADVENT’s ever-invasive monitoring programs.

_It’s a decent security system,_ she sends to Bradford’s mobile once her protections go live. _But audio/visual should be covered from electronic monitoring. Be careful, though._

Bradford has just enough time to show Kelly the message before it erases itself off his mobile. She purses her lips in what is nearly a grimace, and nods. “Well,” Kelly says. “Better than we expected.”

He’d hoped for audio; to gain visual as well is a bonus. It means they’ll be able to move gear and study printouts — maybe even arrange an actual video call with the Avenger — and most importantly of all, drop the married act within the cramped guest room. As it’s been six increasingly awkward days of touches and pretend and uncertainty over how far ADVENT’s monitoring truly extends, Bradford is more than ready to have a retreat from their covers.

“I’ll take it,” he agrees. “So. What questions haven’t you asked yet?”

She’s managed to get the important ones to him through a combination of clever code words and little notes tucked into his pockets or typed onto his mobile, which he’d have appreciated a lot more if it wasn’t so much effort to attempt to find ways to respond to her without saying or doing something the audio-visual sensors would pick up on. Still, they’ve reassured each other of the salient points of their mission — namely, that it is not completely ruined, that it will continue on, that the other teams are moving into readiness, and that her injuries are healing well enough that she will be useful on Unification Day.

Now Kelly regards him with her sharp eyes, and instead of asking a specific question, she focuses on the big picture. “What don’t I know that I need to?” she asks.

It gives him the chance to give her a full briefing, which she probably knows is easier for him to process than a barrage of individual questions. So he explains the full story of how he reached her hospital room, of how he promoted Kleiner to lead the distraction team, of the timeline he’s set for their preparations, and what duties each of them will have during the coming weeks as they prepare for Operation Gatecrasher.

She nods at the end of it, as serious as though they were sitting in the briefing room on the Avenger. “All right,” she says, accepting the tasks he’s laid before her. Then she sighs, short and resigned, and gestures towards the door to their room. They’ve been keeping their voices low — Shen might have blocked ADVENT’s security technology, but there’s a living, breathing person on the other side of that door, and she has eyes and ears that Shen can do nothing to fool. “And what do we do with Nettles?”

At that, Bradford grimaces. “Remember how we figured this would be an easy undercover mission?” he asks her.

Kelly’s lips quirk up, and she laughs for the first time since leaving the hospital.

So, well aware that they have a near-constant audience — actually and potentially, depending on if they’re sharing her space or if they’re locked away in their small bedroom one thin wall away from her — Bradford and Kelly step up their act.

It’s not exceedingly difficult, if only because they don’t spend much time together outside their room. Bradford spends his days moving from place to place, meeting with contacts and making calls from different locations so they can’t be traced back to him. Kelly is based out of public spaces for the most part, ostensibly recovering her strength and using public network connections to search for employment and track down new housing, but in reality using a tablet Dr. Tygan has smuggled to her to prepare for their mission. She works on logistics from coffee shops and public parks and the ADVENT Main Knowledge Depository — library being too old-fashioned and human a word. She tracks patrol movements, studies plans for crowd control, and starts organizing what equipment they’ll need and where they can store it. Bradford, on the other hand, coordinates the people involved from dozens of different locations across the city. There aren’t many XCOM cells still operating officially, but there is a sympathetic shopkeeper here, a fervent mother there, and together they create a quiet underground network he can tug on as necessary.

It means that they don’t usually spend their days together, which means that they really only publicly interact with each other in one place — Nettles’s apartment building.

They quickly agree that they need to be absolutely above suspicion. The building itself has ADVENT troopers stationed in the lobby to provide security for the VIPs lucky enough to live there, and Shen’s told them that the apartments are all fairly heavily monitored by a security team — ostensibly, she tells them, for the safety of the residents. Bradford finds it telling that even in an ADVENT-approved building for their most trusted supporters, there’s still such a heavy focus on surveillance and oversight.

To keep their hostess happy and unsuspecting, they both go out of their way to be perfect house guests. Nettles insists that she doesn’t mind their company, and won’t hear of them moving out until after Unification Day when the security restrictions will ease and make finding a new apartment more feasible. It makes their job easier to not have to worry about housing, but it means over a month of living a room away from Nettles and sharing common spaces with her. 

Kelly has the better relationship with Nettles, after several years of written communication back and forth to maintain her cover and keep up contact, so Kelly usually is the one to bear the brunt of contact with Nettles. That fact suits Bradford just fine: she’s better at it, anyways. But even he makes the attempt to be polite to Nettles, to turn down some of Brian Smith’s grumpiness now that he’s apparently a happily married man and no longer a bitter and lonely old veteran, and Nettles seems to appreciate the effort. It’s very clear, at least to Bradford, that she’s more comfortable with Ann than with Brian, but after a few hesitant days, the three of them settle into a polite pattern of sharing the apartment’s common spaces and respecting each other’s personal rooms.

Bradford and Kelly once more carefully plot the details of their cover, and agree on the few salient and visible points of contact to keep up the charade of their marriage. There are kisses hello and goodbye when one or the other of them is coming or going, trips out of the building together for groceries, occasional evenings where they gives Nettles their regrets and disappear into their own room right after dinner, sometimes even earlier. Kelly spends much of her free time with Nettles, who seems delighted to have the company — they talk, Kelly tells him, but not really about anything of substance.

“It’s like the comms we used to write,” she says, shrugging. “I think she’s been lonely, and wants a friend. None of it’s really important. We talk about the weather, about work — what she’s writing or researching, what jobs I’m looking for. About you, about clothes — never about anything worrisome.”

“Talking about me is bad enough,” he complains, and Kelly laughs. 

“Don’t worry,” she teases. “Only good things.”

Still, he’s suffered through worse covers and far worse scenarios than this, so despite his grumpy mental complaints about the whole situation, he can’t truly say that it’s unbearable.

The real wild card is, of course, Rachel Nettles. She seems to be a completely different woman from the neighbor he once went out of his way to avoid. She’s oddly uncertain of herself at times and strangely confident otherwise; she’s delighted to see them happy together and all too willing to give them time to herself. She’s friendly with Kelly, and a bit more aloof with Bradford. Kelly’s theory, which he dislikes but can’t disregard, is that she had been more than a bit interested in Brian Smith a few years ago, and is either still getting over that crush or is embarrassed by it, which makes her awkward. 

It’s not that Bradford doesn’t believe Kelly’s theory, for all he feels uncomfortable with the idea of Rachel Nettles admiring him, but he’s been around the block a few times and has enough of a paranoid mindset to explore other options. He asks Kelly to prod into it, as unobtrusively as she can, and puts in an encrypted request the next morning through his fourth contact of the day for Shen to have someone do some serious digging on their hostess. 

That night they make their excuses to Nettles and eat on their own. They hold hands as they wander out of the apartment building and a few blocks north to a stir-fry place, where they order food to go and spend the time waiting for the food leaning against each other and mildly flirting, an exercise Bradford used to find difficult. Now he falls into teasing banter with Kelly easily enough, though it’s all false and only for show. It’s enjoyable to be lighthearted for once, even if it’s just for their covers, and they’ve started attempting to one-up each other with their flirtatious comments, trying to make the other genuinely laugh as they pass the time. Only once they’re safely back inside their guest room does Kelly go into detail about her coffee meeting with Nettles.

Kelly is a fairly contained individual, quiet and observant and quick-thinking, not given to exaggeration or needless worry. She reports back on the coffee outing she’d shared with their hostess like she’s issuing a post-mission brief, facts and details on what Nettles asked and how she reacted to the questions Kelly prodded her with. Bradford appreciates her practicality and her concise summary; she’ll be a good team leader, he thinks, and approves of the idea. 

In the end, she leans back from where she’s sitting on the edge of their bed — the room is too small for a table; she usually sits on the bed to let him have the one chair — and looks pensively at the remains of her dinner where they rest on the bed beside her. “I don’t know, though,” she finishes. “I mean, you’re right: something’s off with her when it comes to you. I don’t know what — it’s not like I think she’s going to compromise things or do anything dangerous. But it was just a little… Not what I expected,” she decides. “Nothing seemed inappropriate, or strange, but still…” 

Her frown deepens, as though she’s annoyed she can’t articulate her worry. It causes faint creases to cross her forehead, the hint of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and the start of fine lines around her mouth. She’s forty-one, Bradford knows, but he’s always thought she’s looked a few years younger than her real age; the frown is the first time he’s seen her look her actual age in a while. “I can’t put my finger on it,” she says eventually. “But it’s strange. Something’s changed, something’s not quite right anymore. It’s almost as if she’s going out of her way to be as deliberately… I don’t know, almost as cheerfully oblivious as possible. I still think she had a crush on you, and is still trying to get over it.”

He trusts her judgment, and she’s rarely this seriously concerned. Bradford taps his fingers restlessly against his glass. “Think she’s going to tun on us or report us?” he asks after a moment’s thought.

Her forehead crinkles with another frown, but she’s shaking her head. “I don’t think so,” Kelly says, and then sighs, shrugs. “But still, I have a hard time predicting her. Something’s off. She’s not as stupid as she seems. If I didn’t know better, I’d…” Her mouth twists again, and she shakes her head again. “I don’t know.”

It’s a worry: Nettles is the one person perfectly placed to notice what they’re up to, and her suspicion could sink the whole operation in an instant. Bradford pulls up the dossier he’d run on her some three years earlier, back when he’d first taken the apartment across from hers and they’d been been more paranoid about his neighbors during that mission to steal the Skyranger. They study it together, shoulder to shoulder in front of the tablet it’s displayed on, but there’s nothing there to ease their fears: there’s nothing there they don’t already know, and thus nothing to explain the change her behavior.

Shen’s report comes in a day later, and only adds to the problem. Bradford reads it in disbelief, worry quick to settle over him: Nettles, Shen’s digging has found, was officially censured by ADVENT five months earlier, which precipitated her move out to this particular city center. She still has her high approval status — she’s still a level-five VIP in ADVENT’s eyes, and she still bears an impressive amount of ADVENT commendations and awards and is still one of their best propaganda writers. But there’s a black note on her file now, even if her status wasn’t revoked, and she’s been added to a low-level watch list. It takes flipping through several pages of information before Bradford can figure out why. 

“She wrote a subversive novel under a new pen name about a year ago,” he tells Kelly in a low tone that night, passing her the tablet with the report already open on it. “It got pulled from the shelves a few months ago because it attracted too much of the wrong kind of interest, but an online copy of it took off on the underground torrent sites.”

Kelly scrolls through the report, eyes darting across the lines of text, and he can see the exact moment she comes to the title of the novel that caused so many problems. She makes a little choking noise that might have been a laugh. “Love Desperate and Doomed?” she reads, incredulously. 

“According to Shen,” Bradford says, because while he’s devoted to XCOM’s cause he draws the line at reading such a novel, “it’s some romance between original XCOM soldiers twenty years ago right as ADVENT conquered everything. Apparently,” he adds, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice, “everyone dies at the end — in case the title doesn’t give it away.”

“She got official permission before writing it,” Kelly marvels, scanning through Shen’s very comprehensive report. “And looks like she got a lot of high-level clearance to research on what was really going on those days — ADVENT must have thought it would work as anti-XCOM propaganda if they cleared her to write a story where everyone dies at the end.”

“Obviously ADVENT doesn’t understand the appeal of the underdog,” Bradford agrees. “Or the general human hatred of bullies. According to Shen, the book sparked a resurgence in online queries about XCOM and the resistance, so it got pulled for being subversive about five months ago. She got an official censure, and lost her sanctioned access to the historical records. She’s on a watch-list now — not a priority one,” he’s quick to add, “but she’s on a watch-list, and she never was before.”

Kelly laughs, and then shakes her head. “So she’s running scared,” she guesses, merriment dwindling. “She wrote the novel they told her to could write, used all their research to make it a good story, and then killed off all the subversive characters in the end because of course XCOM heroes can’t possibly live long enough to get a happy ending — and people still loved it enough to make ADVENT nervous.” Her lips curl, somewhere between concern and derision. “She’s too valuable a propaganda writer to cut out completely, so they give her an official censure and keep an eye on her and tell her to move on to more appropriate topics in a different city. It was written under a pen name, so no real loss of face, but I bet it threw her.” She tosses the tablet onto the bed. “So she’s more and less dangerous than we thought.”

He knows exactly what she means. Nettles, on her own, is not dangerous: she’s a propaganda writer and a good one, but she is, in and of herself, not an immediate threat. The people watching her — well, they’re likely more dangerous, and more of a threat to the mission. But this new knowledge does raise a few worries in Bradford’s mind.

The first is obvious: the fact that Nettles is running scared means she’s going to be nervous, more prone to jumping at shadows and finding things suspicious. She’s under watch, of course, but at such a low level that it’s unlikely anyone is actually actively surveying her. But the thought occurs to Bradford that she was likely eager to offer her guest room to them in part to show her loyalty to ADVENT. His cover paints him as an EXALT veteran, one of ADVENT’s beloved first allies, and what better way for Nettles to remind ADVENT of her loyalty than to reach out to an EXALT veteran in need?

His second worry is less likely, but still concerning. How much research, Bradford wonders, had she actually done for her novel? How much does she know about the XCOM that died twenty years ago, and how much of what she knows is valid? 

“We’re still safe here,” he says quietly, reading the uneasiness in Kelly’s eyes as she considers what this new knowledge means for their situation. “I checked all of Shen’s protocols, and we’re good. Even our intel sessions — the data runs scrambled, so if anything, they’ll just see a surge in use and assume it’s Nettles doing research and not anything to do with us.”

“Her next novel deals with a gene therapy clinic,” Kelly remembers, and shakes her head. “That’s why she was at the medical center when you showed up, by the way — she’s meeting with medical personnel as she writes her next story. They’ve already got her working on something else, something safer.” She shakes her head, and sounds thoughtful when she speaks next. “She’s always been curious about you, actually. I thought it was just attraction, but now knowing she’s been into those old XCOM files, I wonder…”

Bradford only barely escaped death the when the first XCOM had been betrayed and destroyed, and he knows he’s theoretically still a wanted man: his involvement with XCOM has never been a well-kept secret. He’s older now, battered and scarred and deep into a cover that has nothing to do with XCOM’s Central Officer John Bradford, but it’s disquieting to think that Nettles might suspect his real identity. He is uncomfortably aware that he’s grown complacent: he hasn’t bothered to keep himself updated about his status in ADVENT’s files, and he wonders how much Nettles found out about John Bradford in her research into that first version of XCOM, or if she even suspects that Brian Smith is not who he says he is.

“What this means,” Bradford says abruptly, “is that we’re not just trying to fool one woman anymore.”

Kelly nods slowly. “If she is under even a minor watch,” she agrees, “then we’ll need to be even more careful.”

So they are more cautious than ever as the days go by. There is no more sensitive information brought into the apartment, on tablets or printouts or otherwise, now that they know they have more eyes than usual on them — bored eyes, probably, Bradford points out, given how far down the watch-list Nettles’s priority is, but extra eyes all the same. He talks with Shen about the increased scrutiny, and the young engineer spends an entire afternoon frantically patching and updating half-a-dozen security systems in the apartment using her remote uploader.

It’s Shen who reveals that the building’s audio-visual monitoring sensors are being upgraded in the coming days to a new system she doesn’t dare block. It’s probably in anticipation of Unification Day, now just over three weeks away, Shen says — there are more being set up in the whole two-mile radius around the central plaza where the Speaker will be appearing to celebrate the holiday, and their building is within that zone of extra precautions. Bradford and Kelly glance at each other as Shen radios them the information, both clearly sharing the same thoughts, and when the communications to the Avenger end with the buzz of the scrambler, they meet each other’s eyes and wonder who will bring up the point first.

Bradford, as the ranking officer, decides it probably falls to him to state the obvious. “So much for a safe haven,” he says, and from then on out, they have to watch their words even within the guest room.

There are ways around the sensors, of course, but mostly they’re embarrassing and involve a great deal of disregard for personal space. Acting married isn’t the real problem — holding hands, affectionate touches, smiles and banter, even the occasional feigned long-standing annoyances. They’ve grown used to doing all of that in the main section of Nettles’s apartment. Continuing the act in their private room, of course, is annoying, but the real problem is communication. They’ve been able to speak freely in the guest bedroom, but time is running out for that liberty. If their words are monitored even in the guest room by ADVENT’s impersonal and automated security systems, then they’re denied any easy way to share necessary information.

Still, as long as they are talking very quietly — low murmurs and words uttered in undertones near each other — the sensors won’t be able to pick up anything. They run tests with Shen on the afternoon before the new sensors come online. Nettles is out at some ADVENT VIP function with the Arts Council, and they move around the guest room raising and lowering their voices and testing different configurations to see how loud they can be without tripping the sensors. In the end, they wind up standing far closer to each other than they’d like to defeat the sensors, but it’s at least possible for them to speak, cautiously, without alerting ADVENT as to what they’re murmuring about.

So now when they have their intel meetings, Kelly comes to sit on his chair’s cushioned arm, leaning against him, rather than sitting across from him on the bed. He stands behind her while she works on the wall unit’s console to track last-minute deliveries, his arms around her waist as he looks over her shoulder to listen to her quiet report on drop-points and supply cache locations. At night, despite the awkwardness, they carefully arrange themselves close together on the bed and report on their various daily tasks in low whispers ADVENT won’t be able to eavesdrop on. Twice, Kelly comes back to the apartment with urgent issues, ones that can’t wait until they can take a walk out in the open air to confer in quiet tones away from monitoring devices, and they hold impromptu and exceedingly ridiculous war conferences in the shower together, both of them stripped down to nothing but underwear as they rely on the noise of the streaming water to drown out the urgent news she brings back in tense whispers. It’s incredibly surreal to argue about ambush points and explosives with Kelly while they’re both half-naked and standing close together under a steaming shower, but it buys them a half an hour of quick, quiet, and most importantly unmonitored conversation each time, which is sorely needed.

It’s still all done rather impersonally, as professionally as possible. They’re both well aware that all this nonsense is a temporary act to keep them from discovery until the mission starts, but still, the first day is an increasingly awkward exercise in surrendering personal space. They’ve both grown used to the little necessary acts required of them in public, but it’s another thing entirely to all but embrace each other just to pass on basic information about the mission. There’s no one else to buffer them from each other: just the two of them, alone, murmuring words directly into each other’s ears and trying to find ways to sit and stand to make the proximity less awkward for them both. It’s not precisely natural to touch Kelly so often, to sit so close to her or to bend his head near her lips to listen to her report. He can see the hesitation in her eyes when she rests a hand on his shoulder to attract his attention, and there’s a faint apology on her face as she tucks herself against his side as they read through reports so that she can murmur extra information on the updates he’s seeing. 

But after an intensely embarrassing first day, the rest of the week becomes bearable: she mutters something under her breath that has him laughing, and the awkwardness is unexpectedly cut away by the sheer practicality they both take refuge in. They quickly start to put together a simple lexicon of coded gestures and actions. It’s like a warped set of the hand movements they’ve shared before on other missions, the military codes and gestures to coordinate a strike force now adapted to their need to pretend to be affectionate and to sneak information to each other under the guise of their covers. A kiss in greeting at the end of the day indicates that they’re still on schedule, but if Kelly puts her hands around his waist it indicates a problem with her supply drops and if she grips the front of his shirt when she kisses him it means there’s something wrong with one of her cache locations. Likewise, if he holds her hips when he embraces her, he’s relaying success with one of his contacts; if he takes her face in his hands to kiss her, it means one of his contacts has gone dark completely.

Nettles doesn’t notice a shift in their behavior, which is gratifying. She and Kelly spend the late afternoon together every day, waiting for Bradford to come back from what he tells Nettles is a work-related assignment. Kelly updates him on what they talk about, but it’s always fairly innocuous; Nettles seems delighted to have someone to discuss her work with, and Kelly learns more than she ever wanted to about the novel-writing process and seems to be acting as Nettles’s informal sounding board for upcoming plot points. Bradford goes out of his way to keep Nettles calm and complacent: he tones down his gruff annoyance with the world as best he can, and does his best to greet her politely when they share the kitchen for breakfast in the mornings.

Still, Bradford finds himself counting down the days every evening. Twenty days left, Bradford tells himself. He glances at Kelly, asleep at his side, and heaves a soundless sigh. He can deal with anything for twenty days.


	14. 03-04: Acquiring Potential

# Acquisitions

## Section 3: Winning the Past

### Chapter 4: Acquiring Potential

Eight days before Unification Day, an apartment three floors beneath theirs is raided — two so-called dissidents neither of them have ever heard of or worked with are arrested and hauled off in peacekeeper trucks. It’s only sheer luck that Kelly and Bradford had chosen to share their dinner with Nettles in the apartment kitchen that night, otherwise they might have been caught in the tight net ADVENT created to hone in on people coming in and out of the building. From the dinner table, they see the peacekeepers swarm up to the building, and the three of them rush to the windows in shock to watch everything unfold. 

All three of them are spooked, and dinner is all but abandoned in the face of quiet, appalled speculation and fearful observation of the flashing lights of the peacekeeper trucks. Peacekeepers come around to each unit in the building afterward, escorted by ADVENT officers in red uniforms, to check IDs and issue statements meant to be reassuring but which instead are simply disquieting. This is a secure, high-profile building, and everyone knows dissidents aren’t supposed to be able to get anywhere near it.

Nettles bids them good night with a tense and drawn face, and Bradford and Kelly are silent as they slip back into their guest room. As far as they can tell, no one on their floor had ever been under any suspicion, but it’s a closer call than either of them are comfortable with. 

They doesn’t have anything compromising in the apartment itself, of course — at eight days and counting, their materials are scattered across the city, waiting for the operation to begin. All the same, it’s sobering, and neither of them sleep much that night. Instead, her hand fumbles against his as they lie in the darkness, and he doesn’t hesitate to wrap his own hand around her fingers and hold on tight, their fears voiceless but shared.

By now, it’s almost second nature to reach for Kelly as she passes by, to hold her hand occasionally when they leave the apartment, to kiss her in the doorway when she arrives, to make room for her beside him on the bed when they sit together to share whispered reports. Kelly, too, has fallen into the same habits: fingers brushed across his shoulders as she passes him out in Nettles’s kitchen to relay the need for a later meeting, a hand tucked into his elbow as they walk to the elevator, a habitual kiss goodbye as an assurance that she’s unconcerned about her next excursion. Everything is casual, calculated to look like more than it is, and it’s easy to fall into habits that look intimate to an unknowing viewer to help keep their covers in place.

But that ease is becoming a problem. It would be simpler if they didn’t like each other, or if they had a way of escaping the constant fear of surveillance. But they’ve known and worked with each other for five years now, and are decent friends. 

At first, the fact that they actually get along is a blessing, as ADVENT security starts to tighten even further down in anticipation of the Speaker’s Unification Day visit and as they both find themselves strung tight with nerves and worries. Because they came into this mission with a good working respect for each other, because they’d had enough of a personal connection to respect each other beforehand, they don’t snap too badly at each other when they’re both tired and stressed. They understand the other’s worry, and give each other a bit of leeway: they’re sharing the same stress, the same worries, and they’re sympathetic to each other because of it.

But it means, too, that the habitual motions they go through every day to mimic intimacy for their covers become harder to separate out from reality. They’d been friends before this mission, and Bradford had already valued Kelly for being one of the very few people he could be himself with. He likes that he can speak his mind honestly with her, and that she doesn’t expect him to always be simply Central, omniscient and distant. She’s always been one of the few operatives able to be casual with him, to appreciate his sense of humor and to let him leave the formality and rank of Central behind when it isn’t necessary. He’s always gotten along well with her, and at first, that had helped as they dealt with the awkwardness of their forced proximity. 

Now, though, that same friendship has become a liability. He’s always respected her, he thinks, and now he can admit that on a personal level, he’s been glad to have her as a friend for more than just her skill as an operative. But because there’s that undercurrent of honest friendship beneath their falsified cover, it’s becoming hard for him to keep genuine feelings untangled from the more romantic motions their covers require.

The fact that she’s clearly starting to falter as much as he is, struggling to keep what had been causal friendship and friendly affection from bleeding over into the imitation of marital bliss they observe to keep in undercover, isn’t as much of a relief as it should be. Bradford finds his hands lingering on her waist when he ought to move away; Kelly’s fingertips brush the back of his neck when she passes behind his chair even though there’s no real need for the touch. Enforced and patently false intimacy is still a type of connection — and that kind of closeness is hard to ignore even in the best of times, much less when so much is riding on their shoulders. 

It’s a relief to have someone else there who understands, who will collapse onto the other half of the bed knowing all the challenges and worries of the day, who is just as annoyed with the constant lack of privacy, just as razor-sharp paranoid about the potential for discovery, just as willing to risk everything for the mission. It is immensely helpful to have even one person nearby who knows the truth of what’s going on, and being able to lean on each other when things are rough is an invaluable comfort for both of them.

But that comfort, Bradford thinks, is the problem. Combining that with their pre-existing friendship makes them a little too relaxed with each other, with the charade they’ve been living for months, and it makes it all too tempting to lean on each other more than they should. 

They’re both well aware it’s only a cover; neither are so foolish as to read anything more into the motions they so habitually perform. But with every moment so tense, it makes the lighter moments stand out and take on additional meaning. Because so much is riding on them and everything is coming to head, emotions are stretched thin. The unthinking ease with which they can slide into their enforced togetherness is dangerous, a sort of false sense of security. It’s too easy to twist that sense of security into a comfort, to turn it into more than it is. The more dangerous the mission becomes, the harder it is not to take refuge in the friendship and understanding they share.

And the threat of ADVENT only looms closer as the days pass: there’s no relief from the tension.

The raids continue, daily, across the city center. Two teams are discovered and go down fighting; two more teams simply vanish, which is more concerning. Bradford lives in dread of a call from Shen. He expects her to report that someone has given up secrets in interrogation, that the mission is compromised, that everything will be ruined just days before it’s slated to get off the ground. But the call he fears never comes. Instead, he scrambles to cover for the missing and to adapt plans so that he’s not relying on the dead or the imprisoned. One of Kelly’s caches for the Gatecrasher distraction team is found, secured, and removed; she can’t replace the contents in time, and she spends two days moving other supplies into safer locations to prevent the loss of more required components.

Days are still busy, more out of paranoia than necessity. Bradford spends his waking hours canvassing the city, keeping tabs on his remaining contacts and trying to stay a step ahead of the ADVENT troopers as they set up cordons and mobile command centers in advance of Unification Day. Kelly, too, is out around the city, checking on her safe zones, moving materials, reviewing routes and mission plans. They arrive back home tired, stressed, and worried from their respective days. 

Everything that can be pre-set and pre-planned and pre-organized has been put together and readied in meticulous detail, and everything else is too nebulous to account for until the operation begins. They’re uncomfortably aware that they’re playing a waiting game at this point, and all they can do is to check and recheck preparations that have already been checked and rechecked half a dozen times before. Discovery this late in the game means the mission will fail before it gets off the ground, and that threat looms over every thought. There is nothing left to do and too much time to think. Tensions run high, and each day seems to bring them that much closer to finally pulling everything off or having the whole thing tumble down to nothing. They are each strung tight in the particular way that happens when a soldier has been waiting too long for the green light to start an operation, when there’s too much time to worry and speculate about what might go wrong.

It’s only a matter of time before one of them snaps under the tension, and they both know it. They’re too tightly wound up in this endless waiting for Unification Day and the mission to keep everything locked down. An outburst is probably inevitable, as dangerous as it will be, and they’re both experienced enough to recognize that one of them is going to break sooner or later. 

He can see a sort of awareness of what’s coming in Kelly’s eyes when he notices her watching him, a kind of calculated wariness as she looks at him, and he knows that he’s starting to look at her with that same speculation in his own gaze. The stress has them both pulled tight, straining to make it to the finish line, and they can’t escape the tension without risking the mission they’re waiting to start. It’s going to break eventually, one way or another, and all they can do is attempt to mitigate the build up as best they can.

They’re professional enough to try to compensate for the stress they’re both under. Too much time to think can be deadly, and they both know it. They go out of their way to try to keep things from escalating. He doesn’t snap at her, even when he’s fairly sure she’s not telling him everything he ought to know. She doesn’t say anything against him even though her eyes flash rebelliously when he issues orders she clearly dislikes. Neither of them want be responsible for sparking an argument this close to the mission start, not when it might provoke an outburst that could make them vulnerable to all the fears and worries they’re desperately trying to keep locked down.

So they bite back sharp words, and do their best to keep their tempers with each other as the stress pulls ever tighter around them. But they don’t comment either on how they are starting to lean harder on each other to keep themselves even as the days tick inorexably down toward the mission start. It’s easy to turn toward each other, and tempting to lean into the sympathy the other can offer. In some ways, that temptation is just as dangerous as the ADVENT patrols they spend their days avoiding. And, Bradford reflects rather ruefully, it’s harder to see coming.

Bradford finds himself reaching for Kelly when Shen reports the death of an operative four blocks away. He doesn’t want to find reassurance in her presence: it feels like crossing a line, like he’s taking advantage of their friendship and leaning too heavily on her to shore up his own strength. But she simply offers him her support, quietly and freely, and having her so close up against him keeps him grounded. He can think through his worries when he matches his breathing with the feel of her steady heartbeat beneath his hands, and she grants him that comfort without judging him for seeking it. Because of that, when she comes back to the apartment with trembling fingers after a too-close call with an ADVENT officer near one of her safe houses, he doesn’t hesitate to wrap his arms around her and hold on to her until she’s stopped shaking. She presses her face against his chest and shudders silently, clutching at the front of his shirt as though he’s the last solid thing in her world. He rubs his hands up and down her back until her breathing evens out into calmness again, and doesn’t think less of her for seeking reassurance from him.

He kisses her — really kisses her, not some chaste stage kiss in front of Nettles meant to preserve their covers — for the first time five days before Unification Day. 

He had meant it to be nothing more than their usual simple greeting, the one they usually share at the guest room door after his arrival home for the day. It was supposed to be just a light kiss hello, just something brief to keep up their covers. 

Instead, she gives him a tired smile as she comes out of their room to welcome him back, lifting her chin up deliberately to invite his lips to meet hers, and the kiss they exchange is neither chaste nor staged. He reaches for her with tired arms and an exhausted mind, and before he realizes what he’s doing, he’s pulling her close without care for codes or covers. The kiss doesn’t even start off gentle: his lips come down hard on hers, rough and demanding before he realizes what he’s asking of her. But she doesn’t hesitate: her mouth parts underneath his, in eager acceptance or pliant surprise, and he takes that as a welcome, pulling her closer and kissing her with undisguised and completely unfeigned desire. Her breath hitches, and then her lips slide across his, encouraging him, urging him on, her mouth warm and wet and very willing against his. They stumble into their room, break the kiss to catch their breaths with their arms wrapped around each other, and — at almost the exact same time — realize what just happened as the door clicks shut behind them.

Neither of them are cowards: they meet each other’s eyes evenly, for all her cheeks are pink and his breathing is rapid. Kelly touches the tip of her tongue to her lips briefly, as if to test for feeling; her lips are flushed from the force behind his kiss, and Bradford can’t help but swallow as he stares down at her. They stare at each other in silence for an agonizingly long moment, and then, by mutual unspoken agreement, her arms drop from his back and he lets go of her hips. They turn away from each other in perfect synchronization.

“I was thinking of ordering in delivery tonight for dinner,” Kelly says as if nothing unusual had happened, and if her voice is a little unsteady, Bradford doesn’t comment on it. 

It takes him two tries to clear his throat enough to respond in agreement, but after that, things return to normal. They’re professionals, after all, and a lapse is understandable. They’re only human, Bradford recognizes, and that is both why they’re fighting so fiercely for this mission to succeed and why it is so damn hard to keep his hands impersonal when he touches her.

It isn’t that he loves her, or that he misreads the situation into thinking she loves him. It isn’t even that he likes her beyond friendship, or that he finds her overly attractive. It’s just human contact: a person who understands, a friendly touch. Their brains are on overdrive, buried in fears and hopes, and the smallest thing can spark a chain reaction that is hard to stop. Bradford finds her pretty enough, certainly, and he respects her abilities and appreciates her company and is glad to count her as a friend. But the kiss was born of stress and weariness and the need to escape the mission if only for a brief moment, and they both know it. It never would have happened otherwise: their lives are separate beyond the scope of this one mission, and once the mission is over, it’s unlikely they’ll ever be tied together so tightly again. He’ll return to his command position, and she’s agreed to act as squad leader for a new ground team.

Or they’ll both be dead in five days, and that possibility slips into the way his touch lingers on her waist and how her fingers drag across his shoulders.

“I’m not going to sleep with you,” she murmurs that night, keeping her voice low to ensure her words aren’t picked up by the intrusive audio monitors. They lie side-by-side in their shared bed, not touching and not looking at each other and definitely not thinking about how close their bodies are.

Her statement comes out of nowhere, but he can’t say it’s unwarranted. Soldiers and civilians alike do stupid things when they think they might die, they’re both under a lot of pressure, and he can’t say he hasn’t thought about it. “That’s probably for the best,” he agrees quietly, unoffended, because while sex might be the physical release they both need, it won’t do anything to solve the real problem of the intense stress they’re under. 

Moreover, it’s too close to admitting hopelessness. To cross that final line, to put aside professionalism and simply live for the moment, would be akin to confessing that they don’t think they’re going to make it through the mission. It’s defeatist: to sleep together would be tantamount to declaring that neither of them expect to have to deal with the consequences of the act. It would be admitting that they expect to be dead in five days, that they don’t think they’re going live long enough to have to regain their equilibrium with each other again afterward.

They’re both mature enough to realize that, and human enough to regret it. 

Bradford finds that he is both relieved and disappointed to have that possibility so categorically denied, and wonders if she said it out loud for his benefit or her own. Still, he respects her honesty, and because it was surely an awkward comment to make — no matter how necessary for both of them to hear it said — he adds, “It’s just five more days.”

She gives a little hum of agreement, and if it takes her longer than usual to fall asleep, he tries not to notice.

He’s more careful the next day. He keeps his hands impersonal when he touches her, and understands why her own touches are suddenly brief and businesslike. It’s difficult not to think about what could be, what might be, what may happen: how the mission could succeed and how it could fail and what each touch might lead to and whether these are their last days alive or not. It is dangerously easy to slide towards using the connection between them as affirmation that they’re still alive. But they’re both trying to remain professional, to keep those pervasive thoughts from affecting things, and because they’re trying to be mature and understanding about the awkwardness suddenly between them, neither of them comment on it.

The kiss goodbye they share leaving the building in the morning is not quite impersonal enough, though, and they both know it. Kelly looks at him with measuring eyes and he brushes the back of her neck with light fingers, reluctant to stop touching her. “Stress,” he says, and can’t figure out how to finish that statement without insulting her.

“Don’t I know it,” Kelly mutters, not unkindly, and pulls away to walk to her tram stop before he can respond.

The real problem, Bradford thinks, watching her pass by the ADVENT troopers guarding the building door, is that they’re both equally tempted. If one or the other of them were stronger — strong enough, maybe, to shoulder the stress and not think about the imminent mission, to touch without wondering about what could come next, to kiss without thinking of anything but the need to maintain their cover — then none of this would be an issue. But they’re both faltering, and neither of them can shore up the other because of their own vulnerability. The next few days will be difficult and awkward. The fact that they are both well aware of this doesn’t make it any easier. 

Two strained days pass and the unspoken tension coils even tighter around them. There are no acknowledgments about how or why things have changed. They’re both well aware of what’s happening between them, and talking about it will only make it worse by reinforcing its existence and directing attention to it. Things don’t get any better, but at least nothing escalates further: they’ve crossed one line, but have managed to drag themselves to a stop just past it. They even don’t bother to censor the kisses they give each other in greeting anymore — most of the time they seem to stumble into the guest room all but devouring each other, only to split apart and regain their composure once the door shuts and there is no longer even the pretense of a bemused hostess to excuse their behavior. 

Two days before the mission starts, though, after they’ve bid Nettles goodnight and retreated to the limited privacy of their bedroom, after their by now nightly check-in with the Avenger is finished — one more team is MIA, which is worrisome — Kelly takes a deep breath.

“I saw you still have that bottle of whiskey from a few weeks ago left in the kitchen,” she says, and because he knows her so well, he can hear the effort it takes for her voice to stay casual. “Seems a shame to not finish it off before Unification Day.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, “you’re right.”

He does have one good bottle of whiskey left — he’d bought it in a darker moment a few weeks earlier, though he’d shelved it without opening it. And she is right: this is really the last night they can drink it. Tomorrow night will be too close to the mission start to risk hangovers and fuzzy heads; tonight they can drink to the uncertain future. He leaves Kelly behind in their room and ventures out into the main apartment to collect the bottle from the kitchen cabinet. Nettles has retreated to her master bedroom, and the kitchen is dark; it takes him a moment of rummaging through the shelves to find the whiskey. He weighs it in his hand almost ruefully. Whiskey, he thinks, might help blur away the stress of the upcoming mission, but it will not make it any easier to ignore the woman at his side. If she wanted to find a method to smooth away the tension between them, the whiskey is not the solution.

That thought makes his hands pause as he grabs glasses from the next cabinet over. He considers, carefully, how very willing Kelly has been to kiss him, how she was the one to suggest the alcohol, how her whole body presses against his when he wraps his arms around her and how she sighs against his skin when they force themselves apart. He looks down at the whiskey in his hands, and hesitates, twisting the bottle slowly between his palms.

Then he reaches for the glasses, and turns back to their room where Kelly waits perched on the end of their bed, watching him with carefully neutral eyes. “Last bottle,” he observes causally, deliberately shutting the door behind him. “Suppose we better enjoy it.”

Whiskey is meant to be sipped slowly, appreciated more for its aroma and flavor than for its alcoholic properties. But it’s been years since Bradford has cared about the taste of his alcohol, and though he’ll still admit to a few preferences, even the whiskey is for getting drunk more than it is for simply drinking. He hands Kelly the glasses to hold, and pours a generous amount into each before he sets the bottle aside. There is only one upholstered chair crammed into their small guest room; through unspoken agreement, she had claimed the end of the bed as her seat weeks ago, and left the chair for him. Now he settles into place in the chair almost gingerly, and finds to his disgust that his hands nearly shake when he takes his glass from Kelly. 

His heart is pounding faster than usual. He’s too old for this kind of eager expectation, he thinks, but his chest is tight all the same. He finds his mouth is dry, so he doesn’t offer a toast. Instead, he just lifts his glass slightly toward Kelly, and is proud to see he’s kept his hand steady. Kelly raises her glass his direction in return, and they both drink wordlessly.

They match each other, sip for sip, slow and silent, watching each other with eyes not quite able to disguise anticipation. They are in no hurry: it takes them the better part of a half hour to reach the bottom of their glasses. “More?” Bradford asks quietly when they’re each down to a sliver of amber liquid left in their glasses.

He can’t read her expression. “I think so,” Kelly says, and it sounds dangerously close to a promise.

Bradford pours them each another helping of the whiskey, and sets the bottle on the ground beside his chair. Kelly accepts her glass without comment, and takes a long swallow almost as soon as he hands it to her. It makes her cough, and Bradford can’t help but smirk as he has a sip of his own. 

It should be awkward, he thinks, sitting and drinking and waiting and wondering. Instead it’s almost soothing. It’s not quite the ritual he’s used to sharing with his soldiers on the eve of a battle, but it’s close enough that the comparison strikes him as appropriate rather than insulting. 

Kelly finishes her second drink first, and sets her empty glass down on the bed beside her. When she looks at him, her eyes are clear and steady. “More?” she murmurs, and Bradford hears everything she isn’t saying.

He remembers her words from before. “Yeah,” he says, decision made, Rubicon crossed. He sets his own mostly-empty glass aside. “I think so.”

Kelly slides to her feet with boneless grace, and before Bradford can stand to join her, she’s covered the short distance between the bed and his chair. He reaches for her almost before she’s within range, pulling her down onto his lap, and it’s anyone’s guess which of them leans in for the kiss first.

It’s slow and very nearly sweet at the beginning. Kelly’s slender and warm, and he finds her a very pleasant burden to have draped across his legs. They kiss carefully, testing and hesitant and soft, quiet and smooth, letting the barriers between them fall as he gathers her up more comfortably in his lap and she settles closer against him. 

Then she sighs into his mouth, a soft sound that sparks a greedy desire in him to hear her make that noise again, and Bradford’s arms tighten around her waist. His kisses turn hungry, more urgent. Kelly’s bright eyes flutter closed as she matches his need with deeper kisses and questing hands. She runs her palms up and down his flat chest in slow sweeps, and hums in quiet approval at the lean muscles she finds beneath his shirt.

He has no idea how long they spend together in his chair. The world narrows to the pounding of his pulse and Kelly’s soft skin under his hands. She tastes like whiskey and he tastes like whiskey and he absolutely does not care. She all but crawls up him in an effort to press as much of herself against him as she can; he plants one hand on the small of her back to keep her in place and slides the other up her shirt to find bare skin to stroke. 

If they hadn’t been interrupted, Bradford doesn’t know when or if they would have stopped. But just as they’re settling back into the chair — his shirt long since discarded, hers now joining it on the bedroom floor; her knees straddling either side of his thighs, his fingers hard on her hips to haul her down against him; her hands behind his head and her arms wrapped over his shoulders as she angles her head to deepen their kiss — just as she’s starting to shift her hips under his hands and he’s starting to press up against her in jerky half-controlled motions, there’s a tentative knock on the door.

They pause at the noise, and then Kelly rolls her hips forward once more, almost involuntarily, and Bradford leans forward to press his mouth against her throat as he rocks up against her. 

There’s a second knock, more insistent, and this time they both still. 

Kelly lifts her head at the third knock. “Just a minute,” she calls, and her voice is undeniably breathless. 

Bradford should not savor the thrill that runs through him at knowing that he did that to her, but it’s very difficult not to. He takes a deep breath; whiskey wars with desire and duty. “Damn,” he manages, and Kelly slides off of him and fumbles on the floor for her top as he stumbles to his feet and across the room to the door.

He yanks it open without bothering to check if Kelly’s fully dressed or not. Nettles stands there, face ashen, though her eyes go wide as she takes in his half-dressed state and clearly annoyed face.

“I’m sorry,” Nettles apologizes. “I didn’t realize — I should have thought —”

“What?” he all but snarls in her face. He feels Kelly touch his arm to calm him as she comes up behind him. He doesn’t dare turn to look at her.

Nettles takes a deep breath, and seems to compose herself, though she can’t bring herself to meet his eyes. “Come over and see the broadcast,” she says simply. “I think you’ll want to see this.”

There’s dread in her tone: horror and fear and distraction. Something awful has happened, Bradford quickly surmises, and glances at Kelly. He immediately wishes he hadn’t: she’s clutching her shirt closed around her chest, her hair tumbled and clearly manhandled around her shoulders. Her mouth is wet and swollen from his kisses, and there are faint red marks on her pale skin, on her cheeks and her throat and her single exposed shoulder, from where his stubble pressed too hard or too long against her.

His fingers all but itch to touch her again, and Bradford ruthlessly shoves that desire back into the far reaches of his mind to focus on the present. 

“What happened?” Kelly asks, stepping in front of him, slender fingers working at the buttons on her shirt.

Nettles just shakes her head, and she leads them only a few steps away from their room into her master suite, where her viewscreen is mounted on the wall. Bradford can hear the news broadcast before they can see it. 

He understands why Nettles came to find them, and though he wants to rail at her for interrupting what had been both intensely enjoyable and entirely a bad idea, he can’t blame her for it.

“Twenty-six gene therapy clinics,” Kelly whispers as she processes the news, backing up so that she bumps into him. His arms come up almost automatically, pulling her back against him as they stand in Nettles’s room to watch the announcement so that they stand with his arms wrapped around her middle. “That’s not just terrorism — that’s a coordinated attack. A big one.”

Nettles shakes her head, eyes glued to the screen. “No one is taking credit for it yet,” she murmurs without looking away from the broadcast. “But it’s the biggest coordinated strike against the Elders in twenty years.”

Bradford stares at the news, more shaken than he wants to admit. “Right before Unification Day,” he says as the cameras pan across impressive damage to a gene therapy clinic in France. “A worldwide scope, coordinated timing… Someone’s sending a message.”

He can’t say he disapproves of the message, but the terror is almost heart-stopping: what will this mean, he wonders in a daze, for Operation Gatecrasher?

Kelly shivers in his arms, and he rubs his hand against her stomach despite himself to attempt to soothe her. “This is bad,” he says aloud, and she understands exactly what he means.

They spend almost another two hours in Nettles’s room, sitting with the woman on her pristine white leather couch and listening in horrified fascination to the reports coming in from across the globe. By midnight, they’ve learned that arrests are being made already, that a fringe dissident group known for adamant hatred of genetic modification is claiming credit, and that Unification Day ceremonies will go on as planned in major city centers despite the attacks.

“We should go to bed,” Kelly says after that last bit of news becomes commonplace, quoted over and over without anything new added to it. 

Bradford nods. “We should,” he agrees, and though it galls him, he looks to Nettles. “You were right,” he says simply. “Thanks for letting us know what was going on.”

There is a flush on Nettles’s face, and she doesn’t look directly at him. He’s still bare-chested, he realizes, and he finds the thought abruptly amusing. He’s perfectly willing to admit that he’s in good shape for a man his age, well aware that he’s damning himself with faint praise by that statement. He’s fifty-five, and he’s had a hard life: he’s leaner than he was when he was young, his muscles less defined, his torso covered in scars from too often being forced to do without timely medical support. 

But apparently he’s still attractive enough to discomfort Nettles, which he finds far more entertaining than he should. It’s the first positive thing in hours; it’s not enough to salvage the evening, but it means he’s no longer entirely angry at her for interrupting them when they bid her goodnight and return back to their own room.

The bottle of whiskey is still open on floor beside his chair; their glasses are sitting empty on the bed. Bradford deliberately ignores them: he’s had hours to sober up and reflect on what nearly happened. As Kelly locks the door behind them, he finds his shirt where it lies on the floor by his chair, and picks it up. He doesn’t put it on, though. 

Instead, he lets himself have a brief and very intense memory of Kelly’s hands helping pull it off his body, and he sighs soundlessly. The interruption, he knows, was exactly what they needed before they both made a very stupid decision — but he can’t deny that a part of him is still unhappy about it.

Kelly’s fingers brush across the bare skin of his forearm as she steps up beside him, and when he looks at her, he sees that same resigned disappointment in her eyes.

She doesn’t say anything, and neither does he. But he reaches his own hand across to his chest to cover her fingers where they rest on his skin, and his half-smile is at once understanding and rueful. She looks up at him with sympathetic eyes, and nods once.

They send a coded message to Shen, not nearly as panicked as it could be, and clean up the whiskey in silence. Bradford flops down onto their bed still clad only in his pants; Kelly takes the time to change into her sleep clothes before she joins him, wiggling under the covers with a sigh.

To hell with it, Bradford thinks, and reaches for her.

She comes to his side willingly, as though she’d only been waiting for the invitation, and it doesn’t take much work for them to organize themselves together. “I’m not going to sleep with you,” he murmurs into her hair, adjusting her head where it rests on his shoulder.

Her laugh is quiet, more a quick exhale of air than an actual laugh. “Yeah,” Kelly agrees, and drapes her arm across his naked torso. He’s not entirely sure if he imagines the kiss he thinks she presses against his chest where her breath is warm and soft on his skin. “I know.”

He doesn’t expect it to be easy to fall asleep with her curled up half on top of him, but it’s comforting to know she’s there, and he shuts his eyes and relaxes almost before he’s consciously decided to do so. Bradford shuts his eyes, before he can think too much beyond being relieved and regretful, and falls asleep content to listen to Kelly breathe in time with him.


	15. 03-05: Acquiring the Commander

# Acquisitions

## Section 3: Winning the Past

### Chapter 5: Acquiring the Commander

Nettles is the first to leave.

She putters around the kitchen, fussing with what to bring in her purse and how she’s done her hair, until Kelly risks commenting on what is obviously nerves. “Aren’t you excited for the Speaker’s presentation?” she asks lightly.

Nettles blows out a breath. “I know I’m not supposed to complain,” Nettles admits slowly. “But these kind of things always seem a little… I don’t know, showy. And after those gene therapy clinic bombings, I can’t help but think that if I were a dissident, something like this would make a good target.”

Kelly and Bradford share a swift sharp glance, and then Kelly turns back to their hostess with a wry smile. “I don’t know,” she reassures Nettles. “Security for these kind of things is always tight, isn’t it? The dissidents are probably off somewhere trying to break into someplace they’ve left unattended for the event.”

Nettles’s smile is weak. “Probably,” she agrees, and her hands twist in the straps of her purse. “I’m sure I’m just overthinking things.”

Still, she lingers in the doorway of the apartment. “It’ll be nice to have this over and done with, though,” she says, obviously stalling. “I’m ready for things to go back to normal.” She pauses, clearly anxious. “Don’t you think?”

Kelly is standing in the kitchen at Bradford’s side, ostensibly helping him make their lunch. “It’ll be all right, Rachel,” she says, without looking at Nettles. “You’re sitting with the Arts Council, aren’t you? That’s a safe place to be, and I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“I just — what about the two of you?” And Nettles’s voice is so unexpectedly concerned that Bradford looks up swiftly. Nettles stands in the doorway, face a picture of helpless worry. “I just — what if —”

“Rachel,” Kelly says, and her voice is quiet and firm. “You’re going to be late.”

Bradford trusts Kelly. He reminds himself of this as Nettles’s jaw drops slightly at Kelly’s blunt reminder. Nettles’s eyes flicker to Bradford, confused and seeking reassurance. Bradford isn’t entirely sure what Kelly’s game is, but he’s willing to play along. He nods at Nettles. “We’ll be fine,” he says evenly, and doesn’t let a trace of his impatience bleed over into his voice. “But you should head out if you want to be on time.”

“I -” And Nettles stops, looks down, and swallows almost audibly. “Yes,” she says, and then she looks back up at the two of them, and her eyes are clear. “Yes.”

Kelly’s voice is casual, but there is just the faintest trace of an accent in her words, a lilt that isn’t usually there. She’s choosing her words carefully; Bradford recognizes it as one of her few tells. “It’ll be fine, Rachel,” she says, and she looks up from the food she’s preparing to meet Nettles’s eyes steadily. “Don’t over-think things. Enjoy the speech. I’m sure there’s nothing you need to worry about today.”

“Yes,” Nettles agrees, sounding reassured. “Yes. You’re right. I’m sure you’re right.” She opens her door, and steps through it before she abruptly stops, and turns around. “Good luck today,” she says simply, and shuts the door before either of them can respond.

Bradford looks down at Kelly, not bothering to censure the look of sheer disbelief and frustration he gives her. “What the hell?” he hisses in a low whisper.

Kelly shuts her eyes tightly, and he has the distinct impression she’s counting to ten to keep herself steady before she looks back up at him. Her gaze is direct enough that it shuts him up. “Trust me,” she murmurs. 

He glares at her again — it’s not as though he has a choice, he thinks in exasperation — but doesn’t say anything else. They eat in silence, a last shared meal before they start their final preparations. Bradford eats mechanically, more because he knows he should than because he’s hungry. They don’t have long before they need to leave, and with Nettles now safely gone, they’re free to start their preparations in earnest. Bradford hadn’t been sorry to see her go, but the relief he expected to feel with Nettles gone doesn’t materialize.

They have spent the past two and a half months coordinating their part in Operation Gatecrasher, and Bradford and Kelly have their timetable plotted down to the second. They’ve studied tram schedules and crowd control operations, paced out distance between planned checkpoints, and have accounted for half a dozen other variables. Their supplies are in position around the perimeter of their targeted zone, carefully prepared for the moment when they’ll be collected and used.

They’ve swept the guest room clean of anything that might so much at hint at incriminating them. It’s a deliberate ploy. They’ll disappear, and hopefully be counted as missing and dead in the chaos to come — it will mean less questions for Nettles and less investigation into their covers. If everything goes right, they will be labeled as just two unfortunate civilians caught in the turmoil, and no one will think to dig deeper into their disappearances. 

In the end, though, they finish everything necessary in the apartment ahead of schedule.

Kelly uses the extra time to break the security lock on Nettles’s master bedroom. While Bradford does one final sweep of the apartment, Kelly disappears into Nettles’s private room, the only part of the apartment they hadn’t dared access regularly. He can hear her keying her way through the security on Nettles’s private wall unit as he gives the kitchen one last check. Kelly emerges from the master bedroom looking somewhere between satisfied and relieved, but when Bradford glances at her quizzically, inviting her to share whatever she found, she only shakes her head.

“I’ll tell you later,” she promises, and returns to her preparations.

They dress with the mission in mind: there won’t be time to change between their part in starting Gatecrasher and joining the retrieval team at Facility 4234A. Bradford is much more comfortable in his tactical pants and his usual long-sleeved shirt than he is in Brian Smith’s slacks and button-down shirt. He’s far more pleased with the weaponry he’s carrying too: three knives and two pistols, more than he’s been able to carry in months. 

One of the knives is technically on loan from Kelly, but that’s because he’s the one who will be deliberately setting off the checkpoint scanners. She is deceptively unarmed in dark civilian clothing and a half-zipped jacket. She’s got a fairly powerful explosive device stored in eight pieces closer to their chosen target, and the detonator for it is carefully tucked into one of her jacket pockets, ready to be used once she assembles the explosive. But she’s carrying no defensive weaponry, and Bradford doesn’t like that fact. The small pistol he has tucked against his hip will fit her hands fairly well, he thinks, and he is already planning on passing it over to her at the first opportunity.

Still, they finish their preparations in the apartment five minutes ahead of schedule, and five minutes is almost as bad as an hour. There’s no time to do anything but wait, and they’ve already waited more than enough for this mission to get off the ground.

Kelly scowls at the shut door of the apartment, pacing back and forth in the living room like a caged cat. They have planned this down to when they need to leave the building — Bradford has an alarm set on the console to ensure they start everything at the correct moment — and she’s as impatient as he is to get everything started.

He shrugs his wool coat over his shoulders, and buttons it up with fingers that are surprisingly steady. He swings his arms back and forth, testing the fit, feeling the knife worn on his left shoulder pull but not catch where it rubs against the fabric.

Kelly stops her pacing long enough to glance at him and eye him critically, checking for anything out of place that might tip ADVENT off before they can get the operation off the ground. She finds nothing; satisfied, she gives him a nod, and starts pacing again. He can’t blame her for her impatient energy. She’s got a dark grey ballcap on, riding low over her forehead; she’s worn it every time Bradford’s seen her head into combat. It shades her face, and he suddenly finds that fact annoying.

“Hey,” he says, stepping next to her; she stops moving and looks up at him, ready for orders. But instead of talking, Bradford reaches out and taps at her cap’s brim, knocking it further up her forehead so he can see more of her expression beneath it. 

She stills, and he pauses, and for a long moment they stand frozen, his hand hovering near her face and her eyes wide as she looks up at him.

He takes a deep breath; Kelly swallows. 

This is it, he knows. The start of everything, what they’ve been working towards for two months and twenty years. Within an hour, they’ll be victorious or dead: there is no middle ground. 

Kelly wets her lips, and shuts her eyes for a long moment. When she reopens them, her dark eyes are surprisingly clear, and her mouth curves in a slow, wry smile. “Well,” she says, and she lifts a hand to meet his where it still hangs near her cheek. Her fingers wrap around his, callused and warm, and she asks softly, “Kiss for luck?”

He snorts out a laugh before he can help himself, but even as he does, Bradford takes a single stride forward to pull her closer. He bends down to press his mouth to hers. Affection and warmth bloom in his chest as she meets him halfway, rising up on her toes to reach for him and pull him down to her. 

There are half-a-dozen reasons why Bradford kisses her. He kisses her because it’s comforting, because she understands what they’re facing, because she’s here and he’s here and because they might both be dead in an hour. But mostly, he admits as his mouth meets hers, he kisses her because he wants to: because he wants this connection with her one last time. It’s not love, not really, but neither is it simply lust — just something beyond friendship, something softer and more affectionate that he hadn’t felt for her before this undercover mission started. It’s closer to sympathy, perhaps, or appreciation: a kind of innate understanding born of shared circumstances and stress. Whatever the feeling is, it makes the kiss soft, gentle and affirming and almost sweet, so that the last minutes before Operation Gatekeeper officially starts pass in a quiet haze of warm contentment rather than in any kind of jittery apprehension. 

The console alarm he’d set to mark their departure time dings, right on schedule. They don’t hesitate. Their arms go slack around each other, and they break the kiss as soon as the alarm sounds. They pull away from each other without comment: no regrets, no attempts to stall, no turning the kiss into more than it already is. Instead, they look at each other briefly, and everything compartmentalizes. Covers and excuses vanish. Kelly gives him a brief nod, and Bradford returns it, eyes serious and expression neutral. They move towards the door in complete agreement. 

This is what it all comes down to, Bradford thinks, feeling the mantle of being XCOM’s Central Officer settle down over his shoulders. He releases Kelly’s arm as they separate at the tram station. “Stay focused,” he tells her, needing the reminder himself.

She nods, and takes a tight breath. She tugs her ballcap into place over her forehead, and then looks up at him. The smile she offers him is everything he likes best about her: amused, professional, supportive, solid. “See you soon, Central,” Kelly says, the first time she’s called him by his call-sign in months, and then she turns away.

They keep radio silence for almost an hour as they travel separately to their destinations. Bradford’s got the longer route, to avoid checkpoints until the one necessary to the mission, so Kelly has the time to scout the area and plan their approach. Her first radio comm is a confirmation that she’s reassembled the explosive device she’d spent months smuggling into place, spoken into the radio in a low voice using code words.

Bradford already knows he trusts her with his life, so when the time comes, he doesn’t second-guess their plan. He steps forward without hesitation into a security checkpoint knowing that his life and his life’s work are both forfeit if she fails.

He sets off every alarm possible when he walks through the checkpoint: after all, he’s carrying two pistols and three knives. It goes perfectly according to plan. ADVENT troops surround him in a heartbeat, alert and wary, and the crowd queuing in the line behind him begins to stutter backward in panic. He watches Kelly dart through the barrier toward her target with a grim sense of triumph as the ADVENT troopers bully him: he knew he could count on her to keep her end of the bargain, but it’s remarkably gratifying to see the proof of that as she deftly aligns her explosives where they’ll do the most damage. No one so much as notices the blip her passage makes on the alert screen, and the troopers keep their weapons trained on Bradford while Kelly hurries to place her explosives behind their backs.

He stalls until she’s straighted up and striding away from the ADVENT vehicle she’d chosen as her target, judging when she’ll be far enough from the blast radius. Kelly doesn’t turn to look back at him or the commotion he’s causing: trust works both ways, and he watches her slip a hand into her pocket for the detonator knowing that she’s waiting for his command to begin. Even as an ADVENT trooper snarls an order at him and slams the butt of his rifle into his torso, Bradford feels satisfaction well up in him. Bradford goes to his knees from the strength of the trooper’s blow, not quite willingly, but it buys him the twenty seconds he needs for her to clear the blast radius.

“Now,” he tells her as he rises back up to his feet, his gut bruised by the beating he’d taken but his defiance perfectly crystallized.

It’s a beautiful explosion.

ADVENT’s perfect world turns to chaos, and in the turmoil XCOM is reborn, a phoenix rising up out of the ashes of twenty years of defeat. 

His radio crackles in his ear, and he hears Shen’s voice for the first time in weeks as she begins to direct the other two Gatecrasher teams into position. The ADVENT troopers around him stagger, stunned, and Bradford lurches up to his feet to make the best of their disorientation. A pistol isn’t the best weapon against an entire troop of soldiers, but it is easy enough to kill an opponent and take his rifle, and from there it’s a slightly more even battle against the rest of them.

He makes a break for it in a flat-out run once the last of the troopers is down, knowing reinforcements will be on their way. He discards the stolen rifle to make himself as unobtrusive as possible again, and joins the rest of the panicked crowd trying to flee from the still-burning checkpoint. He’s taken this route many times in the past few weeks, learning the ins and outs of the area in preparation for this moment, and so even with the world panicking around him, he’s able to twist and turn through the crowded streets towards a small shop door three blocks away.

“Now,” he says once more into his radio as he approaches the door, and on cue the door pops free of the security mag-locks keeping it in place. He throws himself into the small shop behind it, and the door slams shut as soon as he’s safely through the threshold, before anyone else can think to follow him into the carefully prepared safehouse.

Kelly locks up the door behind him with swift fingers: she’s got a rifle slung across her back and grenades at her belt. “On schedule,” she tells him briefly, stepping away from the door. She tucks her own radio receiver more securely into her ear as he strides across the small space to the crates stacked in the corner. 

“Good,” he says, undoing the buttons on his jacket as fast as he can. Kelly steps up behind him and hauls down on the fabric, helping him strip out of the jacket. He reaches for his own combat gear as soon as his arms are free — the rifle he’s carried for twenty years now, the tactical belt filled with grenades and stims. Kelly helps kit him out with steady hands, offering him spare ammo and helping hitch his heavy tactical belt into place as he buckles it. 

His rifle is a solid weight in his hands, and he checks it over as quickly as he dares. “All right,” he says after he’s reassured himself that it’s survived its covert trip into the city center intact. He shifts his gun to rest it on the quick-release clip on his hip, and gestures at Kelly. “Come here.”

She moves to stand in front of him readily, used to these pre-combat checks, and his hands are quick and impersonal as he tugs at her belt to make sure it’s tight and secure around her waist. He checks the strap on her rifle, glances at the rifle itself, and does a brief count to see how many grenades she’s managed to acquire. She’s doing much the same for him, double-checking his own supplies and testing the security of his own straps and clips: they’re each other’s only backup on this mission until they reach the retrieval team, and they can’t risk something small becoming a bigger problem. It’s a pre-mission check they’ve done for each other dozens of times, and it doesn’t take long.

Bradford transfers his smaller pistol in its holster from his belt to hers — she doesn’t like handguns, but he wants her to have a backup piece. She doesn’t argue the gift as he attaches the holster into her belt, and she adjusts it with steady fingers as he steps back to give her one last once-over. Everything is in perfect order. Kelly looks up him: her face is shadowed by her ballcap’s brim, but her eyes are steady and focused, with no trace of nerves or doubt. She nods, ready to continue on as planned, and starts to shift away.

Bradford doesn’t let himself think about it too much. Instead, he grips the front of her tactical belt, pulls her close, and kisses her. The kiss is brief, fast and fierce and almost harsh. She’s clearly surprised by it. One of her hands reaches up to grip the front of his shirt for balance, and the other comes to rest — lightly, almost hesitantly — on his cheek, her fingertips soft against rough scar tissue and a day’s worth of stubble. He holds tight to her belt and kisses her as thoroughly as he dares, her mouth soft and warm beneath his. And though it takes effort, when he needs to pause for breath, he forces himself to simply stop.

It’s the last time — one way or another — that he’ll ever kiss her, he thinks as he lifts his head. “For luck,” he says briefly, and turns away so that he doesn’t have to face her. Her hand falls away from his shirt, and from the corner of his eye, he can see her shake her head minutely, trying to refocus. 

“Yeah,” she says, sounding almost stunned. She shakes her head again, more firmly, and then nods. “For luck,” she repeats, voice far more even.

If they live, Bradford thinks, there won’t be any more need for kisses: no comfort or reassurance required, no false front to maintain cover. And if they die…

Well, at least he managed one final grasp at something more than the mission and XCOM. He tells himself he’s satisfied with that, and views it as a good reminder of what the world stands to lose if they fail.

“Ready?” he asks brusquely, moving to the door.

“Right behind you,” she says, and steps to the opposite side of the entryway.

The rest of the mission is a frantic, pain-tinged blur. Ramirez is down by the time they reach the facility, and Osei follows her in short order; ADVENT reinforcements are on their way, and they don’t have time for any of the protocols Shen and Tygan had so painstakingly studied and recommended for safely removing the Commander from his stasis unit. Instead, the extraction is rough and nearly a complete failure. Kelly spends nearly the entire time they’re inside the facility improvising ways to keep them moving toward safety, and he’s never before been so grateful to have a partner he can trust to solve problems on the fly. Her grenades give them the escape they need, and he takes a bullet to his upper shoulder as he hauls the Commander out towards the extraction zone. He hitches the Commander’s suited body over his other shoulder a little more securely despite the pain, grips a ripcord dangling from the Skygranger, and shouts at Kelly to hurry.

She covers his retreat, backing out of the facility spraying bullets downrange until he’s hooked into his ripcord. He shouts at her again, and she slings her rifle over her shoulder and turns her back on the approaching ADVENT soldiers. She follows him through a burst of ADVENT gunfire, leaping for her own extraction latches, and Firebrand has the Skyranger tearing through the city skyline the instant both of them have been winched up to the loading ramp. 

Bradford ignores the smoking view of the city skyline behind him as the loading ramp creaks closed. He limps down the center of the converted passenger compartment and drops to his knees near the back. Kelly’s there almost instantly, dropping her rifle with distracted hands, already reaching to help him lower the Commander down onto the metal plating of the floor.

“You were shot,” she says without looking at him. She heaves her hip under the Commander’s bulky, suited form, taking his weight so Bradford can ease himself out from under his burden.

He doesn’t need the reminder. Bradford grimaces, leaves the Commander with her, and limps his way to one of the bench seats. “Yeah,” he says, all but collapsing into it. “What are his vitals?”

Kelly looks at him with complete exasperation, still trying to get the Commander’s body into some semblance of order, fighting the immense suit as she tries to lay him out flat on the floor. “How should I know?” she snaps. Her hand hovers in front of the Commander’s face, as if she’s debating removing his mask, and then she says, “The viewscreen’s fogging in regular intervals — he’s at least still breathing.”

“Good,” Bradford says, and leans back against the wall. He touches his shoulder, and his hand comes back bloody. He swears, low and frustrated. “Shoulder hit,” he reports, and watches Kelly’s eyes flicker up to check on him before she goes back to work with the Commander. 

“Damn it,” she says, voice tight. “Give me a minute.”

It doesn’t take long for her to splay the Commander out on the floor. There’s a single life-support tube that Tygan wanted connected to the suit’s chest-piece: it’s attached to a bulky and beeping machine bolted into the corner of the passenger compartment. She pulls at it, dragging the Commander over to the machine in awkward tugs when the tube doesn’t reach at first, and Bradford talks her through how to connect the tubing to the Commander’s suit even as he applies pressure to staunch the flow of blood from his shoulder. There are two tense minutes before the machine’s beeps change into something even and steady, and on a sigh of relief, Kelly rocks back on her heels and then up to her feet.

“Sit still,” she says. “We’ve got a trauma kit here somewhere.”

Bradford is man enough not to complain when she yanks at his shirt with more speed than gentleness to roll it down off his wound, and soldier enough to muffle his grunt of pain when she flips open the injector-stick and jabs the whole thing straight into the meat of his shoulder. It’s a cocktail of Tygan’s devising, little-tested but probably fine — antibiotics and clotting agents and stimulants to keep him upright. 

Only then does she take the time to more carefully examine the wound. “Through and through,” she reports, packing self-sealing bandages into place on both sides of his shoulder, his blood staining her fingers. “You’ll want the doctor to check on it, but if those meds work like they’re supposed to, you’ll be fine.”

“I don’t have time for this,” he grits out as the bandages begin to apply pressure to the injury. He jerks at the top of his shirt with his good hand, covering up the bandages with the stained and ripped fabric, and taps his earpiece. “Firebrand, give me some good news.”

Firebrand’s voice is calm and professional, even though he knows she must be threading the Skyranger through a forest of skyscrapers and evading ADVENT patrols at the same time. “I can do that, Central,” she reports. “Gatecrasher evac ETA one minute forty seconds — no casualties reported, and there’s a hell of an ugly statue down.”

Still at his side, Kelly gives a sigh of relief, and he can’t blame her: with Osei and Ramirez both dead, the mission is already going more poorly than they’d like for all it’s so far technically successful. Losing even one of the four team members on the ground in the distraction team would be painful; gaining all four back is the best possible outcome.

“One-forty,” Kelly repeats, cleaning up the medical kit she’d torn through to tend to his wound. “We’ve got to fit four more people in here.”

“We’ll make room,” he assures her, wincing as the bandages finish sealing and apply a steadier pressure against his shoulder. 

The Skyranger swoops in over a bucolic square lit by flames, and Kleiner’s big form leads three relatively unproven soldiers into the Skyranger’s passenger compartment. Their faces all noticeably brighten when they see the bulky, suited form of the Commander lying prone across the floor.

“Success?” Kleiner asks, a hopeful tinge to his voice as they all shuffle around to fit everyone into a passenger compartment designed for six but now holding seven.

“As long as we all get home in one piece,” Bradford says, and realizes — in a way that lets him know that he never actually considered it possible before — that they have a decent shot of pulling this whole thing off. He taps his earpiece again. “Firebrand, get us out of here!” he orders.

“Roger that, Central,” she says, and he can hear the smile in her voice. The whole Skyranger shudders, and everyone lurches back a few inches as the vessel’s engines rev up to full power. “Kansas ETA two hours, two minutes.”

No one speaks in response: there are no cheers, no tired applause, no congratulations or relieved sighs. Instead, Kleiner’s team look back and forth between each other with frightened and hopeful gazes, as if they can’t quite believe they’ve made it. Bradford shifts his eyes towards Kelly, and finds she’s already looking at him: they give each other brief, somber nods almost in unison, and settle back in to wait.

The two of them sit furthest back in the Skyranger, keeping an eye on the machine that is hooked into the Commander’s protective stasis suit. It hums and shivers, but the lights don’t flicker out of the green zone indicating stability, and the occasional beeps and electronic alerts it produces come at regular, even intervals. Bradford watches the slow advance and retreat of fog across the Commander’s viewscreen, taking reassurance in the other man’s steady breath.

He can’t see through the full-face helmet to the man beneath, though, and it makes him wonder how much luck XCOM still has left after this successful retrieval. The life support whirs and chirps and seems to be doing its job, but the Commander has been hooked into an alien network for close to twenty years. What has that done to his mind? What has twenty years of stasis done to his body? Will he physically survive being removed from his protective suit? Will he survive Tygan’s risky surgery to remove the alien control chip they know is implanted in his brain? 

Even if he survives, will his mind be strong and undamaged? Or will his body be aged and atrophied, too useless to house a mind broken and torn apart by alien interrogation?

Bradford focuses on how their luck has held so far — two killed soldiers and a shoulder wound notwithstanding — and waits. He’d pray, if he still believed in some higher power, but it’s been a long time since he’s had faith in anything but human hands and alien avarice. So instead he sits, and stares, and waits. The minutes tick by in tense silence: Kleiner’s team shuffle their feet and stretch cramping muscles and nervously look anywhere but at the suited body lying across the floor of their transport.

Kelly shuts her eyes, tilts her head back, and to all appearances goes to sleep. Bradford knows how her breathing sounds when she sleeps, though, and knows she’s still awake. He wonders what she’s contemplating behind her closed eyes, and almost envies her the ability to shut out the rest of the shuttle.

When they reach the Avenger, silence disappears into urgent motion and quick words: Shen and Tygan meet them in the hangar with a gurney. The Commander is unhooked from the portable life support machine, and the countdown begins. They have a very limited time frame to manage an extremely tricky surgery on a man whose physical condition is almost surely deteriorated.

Too many things can go wrong, and they all know it. Tygan is a research doctor first and foremost, not a surgeon; Shen is an engineer, not a biotech specialist; Bradford has to miss the first few minutes of the procedure as another doctor checks over his wound and rebandages it to make sure he won’t contaminate the operation.

The operating room is a small storage room just off of Tygan’s laboratory: it’s been scrubbed and sterilized as best they can, and lights and tables and Tygan’s monitors are wheeled into place. Tygan works quickly and carefully. He hasn’t scrubbed for surgery since medical school, but he has a keen eye and steady hands, and when things go wrong he’s quick to right them. Shen assists, monitoring and acting as Tygan’s second with no sharp words for the scientist she usually reviles. Bradford stands to the side, out of the way, and can do nothing but wait as the Commander’s suit is breached and the alien control chip is forcibly removed from his brain.

It’s a tense operation, made worse by the Commander’s wildly fluctuating life signs — for one heart-stopping moment, all three of them are sure they’ve lost him. But Tygan’s clever hands work quickly, and the Commander’s life signs stutter and then regain their usual rhythm, and less than an hour after the Commander is hauled off the Skyranger into the Avenger, Dr. Tygan straightens his back and takes a step away from the operating table.

“I believe,” he says, in a slow measured tone that betrays more relief than usual, “that we have been successful, Central. The alien chip has been removed, vital signs are returning to normal, and the Commander seems to be adjusting to the environment beyond his suit.” Tygan pulls off his glasses to wipe them clean with dexterous hands that only now are trembling. “I would recommend moving the Commander to his quarters for recovery. He will likely awaken sometime in the next twelve to twenty-four hours, as the stasis suit’s chemical compounds leech naturally out of his system.”

It takes Bradford a long moment to respond to his chief science officer, because only upon hearing the whole thing declared a success does he fully accept that he didn’t really expect to achieve victory. His mind is almost achingly blank: he has no idea what to do next, what the next step is, how things will work now that they have actually achieved the return of the Commander.

He didn’t necessarily expect to die, he realizes, for all that would have been the obvious consequence of failure. But he didn’t expect to succeed. So he opens his mouth and asks the first thing he can think of: “Do we even have quarters set aside for him?”

Shen and Tygan share a glance that tells Bradford that he must look even worse than he feels. “We converted the media room,” Shen tells him, her voice soft. “I figured he’d need a private place for mission briefings and such. And,” she adds more pragmatically, “it’s the only other room we had that was completely cleared.”

“Right,” Bradford says, because he needs to say something to agree with them. “Then we’ll get him out of the suit and up to the media room. I need to head up to the bridge and work on getting a command transfer set up, and someone should call the —”

“Central,” Shen interrupts him firmly, going so far as to put her small hand on his arm to stop him from moving. “You’ve been shot, and you’ve been out in the field for months. You need to get yourself into medical and then get some rest.”

He wants to argue with her, but he’s suddenly exhausted and very nearly shaking. He dislikes feeling his hands tremble, so he scowls at Shen. “What time is it?” he demands.

Tygan touches one of his monitors to check, and answers as the screen lights up. “Nearly midnight,” he says.

Bradford shuts his eyes and takes the opportunity to roll his neck. Something pops, and he feels better for it. He’s getting old, he thinks ruefully, and then he corrects himself: he is old, and he can’t push himself as hard as he wants to anymore. That truth makes him sigh, and resigned, he opens his eyes.

“I want the senior staff assembled at ten hundred,” he tells his senior staff. “Get Kelly in on the meeting, and Kleiner. We’ll need a full report, and then we’ll have to decide where to go from here. You said twelve to twenty-four hours?” he asks Tygan.

The dark man shrugs faintly. “Likely closer to twenty-four than twelve,” he admits. “But it is an inexact science, Central.”

“Fine. We’ll meet at ten hundred, and plan from there.” And, because it’s the truth, he looks between them with honest appreciation. “Good job, people. I’m impressed.”

He leaves them to deal with getting the Commander out of his suit and up to his quarters, because now that his exhaustion and injury have been pointed out, Bradford feels himself slowing down. He checks himself into medical, where the doctors assure him that his shoulder will be healed in a week thanks to generous drug cocktails and applied alien technology, and submits himself to one session of accelerated healing. He nearly falls asleep in the med-tube though, and he stumbles into his quarters — a room he hasn’t seen in some two and a half months — and only half strips out of his combat gear before giving in to gravity and collapsing down onto his stiff low bunk.

Stubbornness has him ordering an alarm to wake him after only eight hours of sleep. He doesn’t remember falling asleep or even dreaming: he shuts his eyes, and opens them a moment later to find that eight hours have passed and his alarm is blaring at him. He snaps at it, commanding it to shut up and turn off, and rolls over to check that Kelly is also awake and moving before he remembers that he is back on the Avenger and Kelly is definitely not next to him in bed.

It takes him longer than it should to process that, and he shakes his head as he hauls himself out of bed and into his small — but at least private — bathroom. The shower water pressure is nothing like living in Nettles’s apartment: it’s a mere trickle, and lukewarm at best. He stays under the water until even that trace of warmth vanishes. The chill of cold water is bracing, enough to jump-start his still-tired mind; he steps out of the shower more awake and ready to face the day. 

His wound is healing, remarkably quickly: he checks the bandages after his shower, finds them intact, and dresses in what he still thinks of as his duty uniform. It’s a relief to wear it again, after two months masquerading as a civilian. 

He finds Kelly’s knife still tucked into its sheath among his discarded clothing, and tosses it rather carelessly up onto the small shelf on the wall above his bed: he’ll see her again soon enough, and he can return it then. 

Bradford takes a moment to stand and look around his small room after he’s cleaned up his gear. It’s been something like eighty days since he’s lived here, and the difference between the luxury of Nettles’s ADVENT VIP housing and the stark military sparseness of the converted supply ship is striking. He wonders what it says about him that he prefers the blank grey metal bulkheads, the cramped quarters, the awkward storage, and the narrow bed of his room on the Avenger compared to the plush and inviting guest room. 

He glances in the small mirror on the wall as he leaves his room, and runs a hand over the stubble he forgot to shave. Later, he thinks — they have time for later now, for once.

It’s been a long time since Bradford has felt optimistic. He can’t deny he likes the feeling.


	16. 04-01: Acquiring Competence

# Acquisitions

## Section 4: Winning the Present

### Chapter 1: Acquiring Competence

The Commander wakes a mere twenty hours after arriving at the Avenger, and Bradford is there to greet him when his eyes first open.

He’s smaller than Bradford remembers. The Commander he remembers was slight, yes: a thin, almost wiry man, taller than Bradford, with closely shorn dark hair and a face that somehow always looked pensive. He had been a man of consideration rather than action, and his physique had always reflected that: he’d been thin and tall for a military man, more tweedy desk jockey than solid soldier, so that his uniform had looked almost overlarge and ill-fitting on him no matter how well tailored it was. But he’d been vibrant, quick with a smile and a quip to break the tension of the command center, easy to work with and confident in his decisions.

Twenty years in stasis has not been wholly kind to the man Bradford remembers.

The Commander’s hair is more white than black these days, though he’s shaved it almost completely down to his skin again since awakening. He is rail-thin, and almost fragile, the result of being in stasis for so long. It will take time to rebuild his strength, Tygan warns them all, but there is no reason to suspect that he will not eventually return to normal. But until then, the Commander moves hesitantly, carefully, as though he doesn’t quite trust his own body. His eyes wince at bright lights, and his dark skin has not seen natural light in years. There are deep folds and creases across his face, where time has carved wrinkles into his skin to mark the twenty years he didn’t quite live.

His voice is the same, though, which is at once disconcerting and a relief.

“You got old, Central,” the Commander tells him as they stand together on the Avenger’s bridge for the first time. He sounds entertained by the idea, which also hasn’t changed: his voice is rich and expressive, and Bradford remembers him sounding cheerful more often than not.

Bradford can’t help but snort out a laugh. “Happens to the best of us,” he agrees, and doesn’t point out that many of their friends never had the chance to age. “Anyway, you’re older than I am.”

The Commander had been a healthy enough forty-three when the aliens had captured him. Chronologically, he’s now sixty-three, and physically, he looks even older from losing so much muscle mass to stasis. His grimace recognizes that fact without shame. “You’re still in fighting shape, at least,” he gripes. A hand rubs across his mostly-shaved pate. “Damn it. Not that I was ever in your league before, but now I’m just a puny old man. This is going to take some getting used to.”

Bradford rolls his eyes. “If you’re done complaining,” he says dryly with a faint smile, “the team’s just about ready to deploy. You want a briefing, or do you want to just do this blind?”

The Commander’s dark eyes sharpen with interest, and a smile spreads across his now-wrinkled face. “I did miss you, Central,” he says, and he rubs his thin hands together. He looks down over the map spread out on the table in front of them. “So. Shen needs a thing, and we’ve sent a team in to recover it.”

“More or less,” Bradford agrees wryly. “Local resistance members started the fight, but they’ve gone dark, so we’ll be heading into hostile territory. We’ve got our best operative leading the squad, but we don’t have many soldiers ready to go these days, and most of the ones we do have don’t have much experience.”

The Commander hums tunelessly, a noise Bradford remembers all too well as being indicative of thought. He keys up the monitor, and it flickers to show the interior of the Skyranger, where the team awaits deployment. “Best operative, huh?” he asks.

“She’s the only one still breathing,” Bradford retorts mildly, though there are more reasons than that why Kelly had been the one he’d chosen to lead the team.

It’s easy enough to pick her out of the team based off of his words: she’s the only woman on the four-person squad. “That’s your girl, then?” the Commander asks absently, gesturing at the viewscreen where Kelly sits calmly in the back of the Skyranger waiting for the signal to deploy. He shakes his head, studying the video feed in fascination, looking her over. “You can’t tell me she’s got any kind of military background. And if she’s our best, what does it say about the others?”

Bradford can hear the dismissal in his friend’s voice, and it sits wrong with him: Kelly doesn’t exactly look the part of an experienced operative, he knows, but she doesn’t look to be a fresh-faced rookie, either. “No military training beyond what we gave her,” he says shortly, and he manages to keep his annoyance out of his voice. “But I’d say twenty years of experience hurting the aliens has to count for something.”

Still, the Commander winces and looks suddenly chagrined. “Hell,” he mutters, and almost unconsciously, he scrubs his hand across the back of his neck where he now has a still-healing scar. “Right. It’s not the world I remember. All right, give me the rundown. What’s her name, background? What am I working with here?”

A little appeased, Bradford comes around the monitor to stand beside his friend. He stares at the screen: Kelly sits in the starboard aft seat, closest to the door, and he knows she’s chosen it to be the first out on the ground ahead of her team. “Her name’s Jane Kelly,” he says, watching her sit calmly without fidgeting. “She was Vahlen’s, originally – did some work over in Europe for fifteen years or so before Vahlen sent her over to work with us directly. She came over to help us get the Avenger, and stuck around afterward. She’s been doing covert ops mostly, usually on her own, but I’ve worked with her a few times and I can vouch for her. A good soldier,” he adds, because he can still see the skepticism in the Commander’s eyes. “She’s our best operative, and she’ll be a good team leader.”

The Commander taps his fingers against his arm, studying her. She glances over her shoulder to say something to her team the camera can’t pick up before she returns to her calm waiting. “You like her?” he asks after a moment’s observation.

He does not mean that statement how Bradford’s mind immediately interprets it, but the answer is the same regardless. “Yes,” Bradford says honestly. “She was my top choice for partner when we extracted you, and I couldn’t have managed it without her. If I had to go groundside tomorrow and had my pick of partners, I’d pick her.” To escape from what else his mind wants to think about, he needles his oldest friend: “She’s more useful on the ground than you are, I’d bet. You’re an old man now, Commander, and let’s face it, you never were much good groundside.”

The little taunt has the desired effect: the Commander’s expressive lips curve in amusement, and he gives a little snort. “True enough,” he says, and studies Kelly and her team on the viewscreen for a moment longer. Then he turns away. “Well. I guess this is as good as we’ll get. Let’s see that map again.”

They study the satellite imagery, and Kleiner puts up a few of his drones as soon as the team hits the ground, which grants them a live feed of the area. Kelly moves her team forward at the Commander’s orders, and Bradford circles around the monitors and does his best to keep out of the mission. He does offer his superior officer a few quiet reminders — XCOM works a little differently these days, and it’s not as though the Commander is precisely familiar with the new weapons and gear they’ve developed during the past twenty years.

He’s not familiar with the new aliens, either. He gives a whistle when the drone cameras catch sight of a sectoid. “That’s different,” the Commander says, almost fascinated by the alien’s lanky form. “Bigger.”

“Smarter, too,” Bradford grumbles, and toggles the comm. “Kelly, you’ve got a sectoid at your three o’clock with two more troopers.”

Her voice is tinny over the radio, and quiet. “Copy, Central,” she says, and he watches on the live feed as she makes a sweeping gesture with one arm and sends her two rookie troops around toward better cover on her left.

The bigger of the two men trips as he edges around a low pile of gear. He recovers, catching himself on a crate, but it’s easy to see he’s attracted too much attention. The mission quickly devolves from stealth into combat from there: the sectoid leads the attack, but there are a fair number of ADVENT soldiers and no local resistance left living to provide the XCOM squad with backup.

The Commander, though, is in his element. He grips the railing around the large satellite map display, leaning over it to check positions against the live feed. He directs Kelly through the radio, and she relays commands to her team with the quick gestures and short phrases she’d learned outside Esperanza five years earlier. Everything is going well enough until the remaining ADVENT troopers start lobbing grenades, and then it seems like all their luck runs out at once. The radio channel starts acting up, broadcasting or going silent seemingly at random. The drone’s cameras blur, fuzzing in and out as more grenades are thrown and explosions throw smoke up into the air, making it hard for them to see what’s going on down on the ground. Worse, Kelly’s two newest soldiers panic when the sectoid notices them, and become easy targets.

“Damn,” the Commander hisses as Kleiner’s shot back at the sectoid misses. He stabs his finger at the display, changing the angle of the viewscreen. “Damn,” he says again, angrily, attempting to find a way out of the disaster the mission is rapidly becoming. But there’s not an obvious solution: Kelly and Kleiner are both out of ammo, and the two new recruits are both unconscious or worse from the last ADVENT trooper’s grenade. There’s still the sectoid and one remaining trooper, but there’s no way to deal with them without allowing them a free shot in the process.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Kelly sighs quietly over the radio, sounding more exasperated than worried and likely completely unaware that she’s broadcasting. There’s a perturbingly close echo of gunfire overheard through her microphone, and then she raises her voice and asks, “Central, PSP?”

Bradford’s lips try to twitch up into a smile, and he ruthlessly denies the impulse. “Granted,” he says instead into the comm. “Go for it.”

On-screen, he watches Kelly sling her shotgun back down onto the clip that holds it at her waist. The Commander raises an eyebrow as they watch Kelly start to move. “PSP?” he asks.

“Old acronym,” Bradford explains without taking his eyes from the viewscreen. He would elaborate more, but Kelly darts forward out of the trees. She sprints across the open ground towards the train, skids to a halt directly in front of the sectoid causing such problems, and in a fluid swinging move, pulls her sword from her back and slices it straight down through his shoulder. The sectoid gurgles, collapses, and goes still.

The final ADVENT trooper turns, bringing his gun to bear on her. She ducks, and his shot goes wide; as he desperately tries to target her again, she lunges forward a second time with her sword, and cuts the trooper down.

“Targets eliminated,” she says into her comm, and she’s not even breathing hard. “Site acquired. Can we get confirmation the site is secure?”

“Hell,” the Commander says, sounding impressed. “She’s a menace.” 

Bradford smiles faintly, feeling both unaccountably proud and completely satisfied at the same time. “I told you,” is all he says, but his smirk is clearly audible in his words.

“You did.” The Commander flicks his fingers across the display, scans the area, and then toggles his comm. “Good work, team,” he praises, and relays instructions for acquiring Shen’s equipment. Only once everything is in motion and people are swarming into position does he cut radio contact. He steps down from the display, and then he looks over at Bradford.

“Since when does XCOM use swords?”

Bradford smirks. “It’s been a rough twenty years, Commander,” he says, though to be fair, he’s never seen Kelly use an actual sword before. Pipes, yes, and a baseball bat a few times and an exceptionally large axe the once, but never before a real sword.

“I want to hear that whole story sometime,” the Commander muses quietly, and then clarifies, “How XCOM is still here after twenty years, how we wound up with an alien supply ship for a base. Last I checked, we were still underground. And I mean that literally.” 

Bradford shakes his head. “It’s not that good of a story,” he deflects, uncomfortable with the thought of the talk he knows they’ll need to have soon. “We’ll find some drinks and go over it sometime.”

The Commander nods, and then furrows dark brows. “So. PSP?” he asks. “Old acronym, you said. For what?”

Bradford huffs out a breath that is nearly a laugh. “Permission to solve problems,” he admits, and this time, he can’t prevent the faint smile that wants to spread across his face. “An old code from working groundside with her. I hear that and I know she’s got some way to get us out of trouble.” He meets the Commander’s eyes, amused despite himself. “It means she’s got a way to solve the problem, but doesn’t have the time to explain how. And you have no idea,” he adds, still slightly exasperated by it, “how long it took to convince her to give me even that much notice she was planning something.”

The Commander laughs, and crosses his arms. “Well, I won’t argue with it. She did solve the problem. Your girl’s a menace, Central. I like her.”

Bradford does grin at that. “Yeah,” he says. “I thought you might.”

Shen is all too eager to get her hands on the power converter; she and her engineers haul it off without even a second glance for the returning soldiers who managed to recover it. Kelly’s talking with Kleiner when Bradford leads the Commander down to actually meet her for the first time; Kleiner notices them coming, and the big man is quick to duck out of the way and out of the spotlight, leaving his team leader to face XCOM’s two highest-ranking officers alone.

“Kelly,” Bradford says, the first time he’s used her real name in more than two months. She gives him a brief smile. He returns it almost out of habit, and turns to his oldest friend. “This is the Commander.”

He grimaces at that. “I do have a name, you know,” he says, and then, to Kelly, “I’m —”

“The Commander,” she agrees mildly, her smile still in place. She tilts her head higher to look up at him — he’s nearly a foot taller than her — and offers her hand for a shake even though the Commander is already moving towards a salute: the best of the new civilian XCOM meeting the last of the old military XCOM. “I’m told it’s bad luck to use real names in XCOM.”

Bradford remembers that conversation, and chuckles despite himself at the Commander’s glare. “You had to go and keep that part of things,” the Commander grumbles, though he accepts Kelly’s proffered hand and gives her a quick handshake rather than the salute he’d half-started instead.

“I like the sword,” Bradford tells Kelly, eying the harness she’s using to keep it strapped to her back. “That’s new.”

She shrugs, but he knows her well enough to see the faint embarrassment in her expression. “Machete, technically. It was useful enough in Panama that I brought it home with me.”

“Well, you should definitely keep it,” the Commander agrees. “Good work out there. Central told me you were our best operative — I’m willing to believe it.” And then, more slowly, studying her where she stands loose and limber in front of them, he adds, “You’re a decent team leader and you solve problems well. Keep up the good work.”

“I’ll do my best,” she promises, though Bradford can see the spreading flush on her cheeks from the praise. “Kleiner’s a good solider. The others,” and she glances at Bradford. They share a sort of half-shrug, acceptance and resignation. “They’ll improve, once they’re out of medical. And Marquez says he’s got another few recruits in the pipeline.”

“Good,” the Commander says. And he claps a large thin hand onto her shoulder. “I’ll expect you to report in on behalf of your team in the mission briefing — an hour from now, in my quarters, with the rest of the senior staff.”

“Yes, Commander,” she agrees easily, and the Commander slides his hand from her shoulder. 

“I think,” he says thoughtfully, “I’ll call you Menace.”

Kelly blinks at him, surprised and not willing to show it; Bradford, though, knows her tells well enough now to read confusion in her nonplussed reaction, and he breathes out an amused huff of air. “That was fast,” he says to the Commander.

The Commander glances at Bradford. “Well, you vouched for her, and I liked what I saw.” He gives Kelly a brief smile. “Anything else?”

“If you have a minute, Central,” Kelly inserts with a speaking glance at Bradford.

The Commander nods, and steps back. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, and turns instead to go forward and meet Firebrand where she’s climbing out of the Skyranger’s cockpit.

“You want to get that gear off?” Bradford asks Kelly, gesturing, and they turn together towards the armory. It’s been thirty-three hours since they arrived back at the Avenger, and aside from the briefing they’d shared with the rest of XCOM’s senior command before the Commander had awakened — which, by unspoken agreement, had been as deliberately concise and bland as they could make it — they haven’t had any chance to check in with each other since returning home to the Avenger. 

There are any number of things they could talk about, Bradford realizes, but mostly he can think only of things that they won’t be discussing. He turns his mind from those pathways, and considers what else they might need to go over. There are a few options, so he leaves his question open-ended. “What have you got?”

“So right before we left to start Gatecrasher,” Kelly reminds him evenly as they walk together down the hallway, “you might remember I did a bit of investigating in Nettles’s personal wall unit in her master bedroom.”

“Sure,” he recalls. He remembers, too, the expression on her face when she returned from that investigation. “Find anything?”

Kelly waits until they’re in the armory to respond. Kleiner has already come and gone, and both of her other team members are still down in medical being checked out, so they’ve got some privacy. She turns to him with a deliberately blank face. “Rachel Nettles,” she says, “is an XCOM sympathizer.”

“A what?” he repeats, not sure if he heard her correctly.

A smile teases the edges of her lips at his obviously incredulous response. “An XCOM sympathizer,” Kelly says, and looks away from him to start fiddling with her admittedly light armor. Bradford steps forward almost automatically to help her with the job, pulling her sword — machete — harness from her shoulders. “Or at least, anti-ADVENT. She had an entire research database locked down on her console, behind four or five security systems, filled with all sorts of notes. There was speculation on what had actually happened, if XCOM had actually gone underground, who might be XCOM agents, if they were worth reaching out to… A whole database full of intel that would have gotten her locked up or killed if ADVENT found it.”

She turns to allow him better access to her armor, obviously comfortable with letting him help her remove her combat kit. He unfastens her breastplate from where it hooks over her shoulders into the paneling protecting her back. “You’re kidding,” Bradford says, setting the body armor aside. “You’re sure it wasn’t just stuff for that novel that got pulled?”

Kelly shakes her head, stripping off her arm guards and setting them aside to be cleaned. “That was a completely separate file,” she says. “This was real research, not story notes or the like — this was actual, classified information she was trying to sort through.”

Bradford watches her place her arm guards in the disinfectant zone, and waits while she peels off her thigh guards as well. “Could explain why she was so jumpy,” he says at last. “When did that start, do you think?”

Her expression flickers — annoyance, he thinks, carefully tucked away. “I’m pretty sure it started before we stole the Skyranger, actually.”

He crosses his arms, considers her as she wiggles out of her last pieces of armor. “She suspected us?”

Kelly scowls. “Your background, mostly,” she admits, and he can tell that hurts her professional pride. She’s been operating undercover for nearly twenty years; to have discovered Nettles was watching them suspiciously for so long must have stung her pride a bit. “I think she knew enough about the real EXALT to know something was off about you. I don’t know if she ever really put two and two together to figure out who you really were,” she adds quickly. “But if she was an XCOM sympathizer who suspected you might be an XCOM operative working undercover, it would explain why she was trying to scare me off back before we stole the Skyranger.”

Bradford shakes his head. “It’d explain why she was so interested in us, at least.” He considers her behavior. “Overprotective, really.”

Kelly nods. “It explains a lot of conversations we had back in the Skyranger days, actually,” she says. “She did seem to think that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into by attaching myself to you. And then, once it became pretty clear we were sticking together, I think I just muddied the waters for her — she couldn’t tell if I was genuine, and therefore you were what you said you were, or if I was working with you for some XCOM plot she couldn’t dare openly support, or if I was who I said I was but you weren’t and it was some terribly complicated bad romance novel scenario.”

He huffs out a laugh despite himself. “No wonder she kept an eye on us.”

“Pretty much,” Kelly agrees. A smile twitches at the corner of her mouth. “The curiosity of it all must have been driving her mad.” 

She finishes with her armor, and pulls her grey ballcap from her head, leaving her clad only in the dark charcoal-colored pants and the lighter grey shirt she’d worn as an underlayer beneath her armor. There’s sweat drying at the neck of her shirt, which has come untucked from her pants on one side, and there’s a smear of what is probably just mud on her left leg. Wisps of dark brown hair are matted around her face where they’ve come loose from the ponytail she wears. 

“I think it’s why she invited us to stay with her,” she continues. “Sort of a double bonus for her, really — figuring out what we’re really up to, and if she’s an XCOM sympathizer, maybe giving us a safe base on the off chance we were really XCOM ourselves.”

“Wonder what she made of us vanishing right after Gatecrasher,” Bradford realizes dryly, and uncrosses his arms. “You must have suspected some of this, given how obvious you were about things when you sent her off before the mission started.”

“Yeah, well.” Kelly gives him an apologetic smile. “I did more than that. I added a line to her database before I shut it all down. I pointed her towards Peter van Diepen in Sector Five.”

It takes Bradford a moment to connect the dots, but when he figures it out, he lets out a low whistle. “Not bad,” he admits. “He’ll sort out if she really means it or not.” His laugh is low and almost incredulous. “Rachel Nettles, XCOM sympathizer. How the hell did you get into her secure system? You were only in her room for ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”

She gives him a withering look, as if to remind him how she’s survived the better part of twenty years under ADVENT’s radar, and he holds up his hands to ward off her reply. “All right, all right,” he says, and shakes his head again. “Still. Can’t say I saw that coming.”

Her smile is easy and familiar, and he returns it without thinking. “I’d have told you earlier,” Kelly says, “but we didn’t have time before Gatecrasher and we’ve been a bit busy since then.”

“Fair enough,” he agrees, and there is suddenly a long stretch of silence between them. The quiet makes Bradford very aware that they are standing alone in the echoing armory, mere feet away from each other, and that Kelly’s protective armor is no longer covering her body. It shouldn’t make his skin prickle: he’s been far closer than this to her, and far more private. But she seems just as awkward with the sudden realization of their separation from everyone else, and they simply stand and stare at each other for a disquieting moment.

She looks away from him first. “So, the Commander,” she says, and her voice is just a little higher than usual, a little off of normal. “He’s not what I expected. Older, taller. Thinner.”

It’s a completely random observation. Bradford’s too grateful for the clear change of subject to remark on the strangeness of her comment. Kelly had never known the Commander in his prime and had only interacted with him when he’d been sealed into a bulky stasis suit. He can understand her concerns: the Commander now looks very little like the old photographs of him that she must have seen in the records. “He was never a big man,” he says instead. “And we’ve all gotten older these past twenty years.”

Her question is soft, tentative, and she continues to avoid his eyes by moving to her locker to hang her cap inside it. “He’s still what we need to win, you think?”

“Yes,” Bradford answers, without hesitation, and he hadn’t known he’d felt so strongly about it until he answered her. 

She shuts her locker, and nods when she looks back up at him. “Good,” she says simply, and there’s another long, quiet pause of just the two of them standing together and watching each other. It’s not quite comfortable: there’s an undercurrent running through the silence, some tension between them humming under the surface of things, something that they both know shouldn’t be there. But that awareness isn’t entirely new, so for all its awkwardness, it’s almost a comfort to still have something lurking unsaid between them.

Then Kelly takes a breath, and turns away. “I’ll see you at the briefing, Central.”

“Sure,” he says, and nearly adds an endearment on to his agreement because he’s peppered his speech to her with little terms of affection for the past few months. Instead, he frowns at her retreating form, and shakes his head to clear it.

Back to normal, he tells himself. Just like it should be. It’ll take time to shrug off undercover habits, but that’s understandable — he’ll be patient with her if she slips, just as he’s sure she won’t take any of his mistakes personally. They’re professionals, and they know how much of their mission was their cover story and how much of it was simply stress. They won’t turn those two and a half months into anything they weren’t.

Still, Bradford scowls at the empty armory. “Damn it,” he says softly, with great deal more feeling than he expected.

And he deliberately takes a different exit than the one Kelly had chosen, just to put a little more space between them before the mission briefing.


	17. 04-02: Acquiring Normalcy

# Acquisitions

## Section 4: Winning the Present

### Chapter 2: Acquiring Normalcy

Having the Commander back is everything Bradford had dared hope.

XCOM doesn’t merely stutter back to life. Almost overnight, it is transformed into something that blazes forward like a brand in the night, strong and sharp and bright. 

It’s not the XCOM it once was. The first XCOM had been a military organization, staffed wholly by those who’d come up formally through the ranks of various government forces. The first members of XCOM had held security clearances and official ranks: they’d been the best and brightest humanity had to offer. Council nations had sent soldiers, scientists, and engineers to the cause, and every single one of them had been carefully selected, extensively scrutinized, and meticulously prepared for their new assignment. There had been uniforms from half a dozen different nations, translators stationed beside officers in the command center, and an entire department devoted to making sure that every single person attached to XCOM was operating at their peak mental and physical condition.

This version of XCOM is hardly that organized. There are uniforms now, which is new — they emerged sometime over the past two months while he’s been undercover, though Bradford’s still not entirely sure who’s responsible for them. He doesn’t bother switching over to the black and grey jumpsuit himself: the privilege of seniority, he tells himself, and keeps wearing the clothes he’s considered his duty uniform for the past two decades. No one says a word about it, but then the Commander’s also instituted some semblance of rank onto this new XCOM, and Bradford finds himself in the position of outranking everyone but the Commander himself. 

He finds the new rank system amusing, in more ways than one. It’s mishmash, a sort of hodgepodge of titles and ranks cobbled together from non-commissioned and commissioned officers alike, mostly based on the Army’s structure but with the occasional random nod to the Commander’s Navy background. As one of the few people in the current XCOM with an actual pre-invasion military background, Bradford views the whole thing as ridiculous, and doesn’t hesitate to say so.

“What?” the Commander asks, a faint grin creasing his face. “It’s not like there’s any actual human military authority left anymore to argue with me. I always did want to make Admiral someday.”

Bradford only rolls his eyes. “You’ve been a commander for decades,” he reminds his superior officer. “I don’t think you’re ever getting called anything else, no matter what rank you give yourself.”

“Fair enough,” the Commander accepts, humor bright in his eyes. “I figure I’ll use commissioned officer ranks for the groundside team leaders, which leaves us as flag officers. You were Army, though, weren’t you? I don’t suppose you want to be a general? ”

Bradford had been promoted to Major when he’d been assigned to XCOM twenty years ago, and he’d been justifiably proud of reaching that rank. He’d considered himself career military at that point, and had hoped then it wouldn’t be his last promotion. But he’d never been ambitious enough to aim for putting stars on his shoulders. Now he just shakes his head. “Some review board,” he grouses, and the Commander roars with laughter. He lists Bradford’s new official rank as Lieutenant General, directly beneath his own rank of Admiral, and finds nothing wrong mixing Bradford’s Army rank with his own Navy title in XCOM’s homemade hierarchy. 

The Commander filters his jumbled collection of ranks down over the new XCOM, granting the previously uncoordinated staff some semblance of hierarchy and order. Between that and the uniforms, Bradford watches a change come over the crew of the Avenger. Staff stand a little taller, and take each other a little more seriously; his own team of bridge officers start calling him “sir” again, and for the first time in decades, there’s a chain of command that’s more official than simple on-the-spot delegation. 

It’s not entirely a painless transition — most of XCOM’s personnel don’t realize just how badly the Commander has butchered various military ranks to put them into place, and Marquez has to actually draw a chart and tack it up to the wall in the soldier barracks before most of the new recruits figure out that a Sergeant outranks a Corporal. There’s minor squabbling over who was assigned what rank and who deserves a promotion, but Bradford manages to overrule most of it with a glare and a brusque reminder that rank is earned, even though in reality it’s now simply given at the Commander’s sole discretion. 

Besides, the Commander has sensibly started off with some room for improvement, and has largely avoided promoting even his current leaders into the upper ranks he’s designated for the soldiers. Kelly, who has stepped admirably into the role of squad leader and general spokesman for XCOM’s combatants — the role Bradford had once hoped Marquez would hold — is granted the rank of Captain: she’s the highest ranking groundside operative. Her second, Kleiner, is turned into a Lieutenant, and just about all the other recruits with actual on-the-ground experience are advanced to the rank of Corporal. 

Bradford thinks of the old world, of promotion criteria and review boards and pay grades, and keeps silent. Still, the Commander obviously sees his discomfort with assigning military rank to operatives without military backgrounds, and defends his choice. “It’s the little things, Central,” he says quietly. “A sense of order and progression, something for the troops to work toward and look forward to. A clear chain of command doesn’t hurt either.”

“Fair enough,” Bradford accepts after a moment. It’s not something he would have ever thought of, he recognizes uneasily, but it’s a good idea. One more reason, he thinks, why having the Commander around is just what XCOM needed.

The pseudo-military overlay that comes with more standardized uniforms and ranks helps make the whole organization feel more legitimate, and the Commander is quick to continue to drive home the point that XCOM is no longer a ragtag bunch of independent resistance operatives anymore. 

“XCOM,” he states with quiet pride a mere week after he awakens, “is humanity’s last, best hope for survival.” He looks around the hangar bay. It’s the only place large enough for all of XCOM to meet, so it had been chosen as the location for his first all-hands meeting. There are perhaps sixty people standing in loose clusters around the Skyranger, looking up at the Commander where he stands on top of a crate so that everyone can see and hear him. 

“All of us,” the Commander continues, “came here for different reasons. But there is something that has kept each of us here.” He pauses, looks around the room. No one speaks. “We are each here because we believe that the Earth is ours, and that our fates should be our own. We are here because we believe in free will, not the will of the Elders. And we are here because we are ready to fight for what we believe in.”

The Commander keeps talking. He’s always been good at motivational speeches, Bradford remembers, but Bradford doesn’t need to be motivated. He’s devoted the past twenty years of his life to this cause: he’s as dedicated as anyone could ask for, and because of that, he finds himself ignoring the Commander’s heartfelt speech.

Instead, he allows himself to cross his arms and look out over the gathered crowd hanging on the Commander’s every word. Bradford can’t help but marvel at the sight. XCOM reborn, he thinks, still somewhat dazed by the fact that for once everything seems to be going right again. 

This is what he’s been hoping for and working toward, and it’s intensely satisfying to see his goal realized. It’s not that his work is done now that XCOM is returning to some semblance of overt action again. They’d been held to an impasse by the aliens for the last twenty years, but with the Commander back, Bradford expects the war will start again in earnest. He’s still XCOM’s Central Officer, for all he’s older and more cynical than before. His place is where it’s always been: on the bridge, at the Commander’s side, running logistics and keeping tabs on everything required to fight the battles XCOM must be prepared to join.

It’ll be different from what the operation had been like twenty years ago. For all the Commander has draped military trappings over it, XCOM is hardly a professional armed force with official government sanction and support. They’re facing an entrenched and prepared opponent this time around, rather than an invasion force with little knowledge or ground support, and they’re doing it with less resources and fewer options than before.

Still, some of the Commander’s motivational phrases must be hitting home, because Bradford finds that he regards the task ahead of him not with dread or concern but almost with relish. This is what he’s been waiting for, he thinks fiercely. This is the chance he fought to give XCOM, the gamble he risked more than just his life on, and against all odds, XCOM is ready to lash out once more to fight for humanity. Bradford is almost eager to get to work, for all he knows it’s going to be a long, hard, uphill slog.

He can see that same excitement in the eyes of XCOM’s members as he looks out over the crowd. Shen stands with a small horde of engineers at her back, her dark eyes intent on the Commander and satisfaction writ large across her face. Tygan and his doctors are a neat cluster of white lab coats and professional attire, a sharp contrast against the bridge crew in their black and grey uniforms grouped next to them. Marquez looms behind a group of eager-looking rookies: compared to the scarred veteran, the fresh recruits he’s clearly shepherding in front of him look all of twelve years old. Kelly stands next to him, overshadowed by his bigger body, her arms crossed and her head tilted as she watches the Commander speak. Bradford wonders what she makes of his optimistic rhetoric; her face is set in carefully neutral lines.

Sixty whole people, Bradford recognizes again in something akin to wonder. And this is only a fraction of the new XCOM’s forces: the best and the brightest, stationed on the Avenger rather than in one of the dozens of small settlement camps XCOM has started spreading across the continents. He’d have given a great deal even as recently as two years ago to have this many dedicated people willing to risk their lives for the cause.

“It won’t be easy,” the Commander cautions, clearly at the end of his speech. “I can’t promise that. But I can promise that I’ll do my best by you, and that I won’t let you down.”

Marquez raises his voice as the Commander steps down from his makeshift platform. “For XCOM,” he announces, and then barks out: “Vigilo confido!”

It’s clearly something his recruits are used to, a call and response of some sort, because as if on cue, the dozen or so soldiers-in-training standing in front of him all shift into something like attention. Heels snap together, spines straighten, and heads turn to face forward. “Vigilo confido!” echoes in chorus from a dozen young throats.

Bradford wants to be amused by that, and instead finds the response almost nostalgic. It brings back dimly remembered memories of boot camp and the deliberate indoctrination that comes from joining any kind of armed forces. Marquez was a Marine: he understands esprit de corps, and the need to make his new recruits feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves. The call-and-response motto might be trite, but all the same, it makes them stand a little taller and square their shoulders back a little prouder.

The Commander smiles at the shout, and moves to stand beside Bradford. “Well, Central,” he says, and claps his hand onto Bradford’s shoulder briefly. “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

Bradford’s response is short and heartfelt. “Ready when you are, Commander.”

It’s intensely satisfying to get down to work again. The Commander sets up scheduled meetings, and is quick to designate his senior staff. Bradford, of course, remains XCOM’s Central Officer, and it’s gratifying to see the Commander merely confirm the appointments he’s unofficially made over the past few years. 

Lily Shen steps into the shoes her father left open for her as XCOM’s chief engineer. The Commander goes out of his way to call Shen “doctor”, even though Shen’s formal education ended when she was ten and the aliens started cracking down harder on schools. It’s something Bradford had never thought to do, and he regrets not extending her even that token courtesy when he watches eager pride shine from her eyes as the Commander brushes aside her modest disclaimer about not deserving the title.

“You can’t tell me there isn’t a doctorate or two worth of knowledge in getting this thing up in the air,” he tells her. “Any reasonable institution would be begging you to take a fellowship or a chair what with all you’ve done — it’s hardly your fault the aliens have them all locked down.”

Tygan, who can at least honestly claim his own title of “doctor” without needing it granted by the Commander’s generous nature with ranks, lifts an eyebrow at that claim but refrains from commenting. Bradford can’t decide if that’s approval or not, but either way, the Commander confirms Tygan as chief scientist without hesitation.

“Any man who literally ripped ADVENT out of his head — and mine — is welcome here,” he says, and that’s the end of any discussion on the matter.

Kelly rounds out the last of the senior staff, at Bradford’s quick recommendation. From the disbelief on her face when the Commander informs her of her new status, it’s not a role she ever expected to formally hold for all she’s informally acted the part for years. Bradford, remembering how poor a soldier she’d been when had she first arrived at Esperanza five years ago, finds he can’t really fault her for her surprise. Five years ago, he thinks ruefully, she’d been an excellent undercover operative and an abysmal front-line soldier. She’d had no leadership experience and wasn’t used to working with others: he’d never have picked her to lead a groundside squad, much less to be the voice for all of XCOM’s combatants.

Because she looks fairly overwhelmed — not an expression he’s used to seeing on her face — Bradford takes pity on her, and offers her a slight tease to help her regain her composure. “Just remember to ask before you go solving more problems,” he reminds her.

Her lips curve at his words, and the little line of worry clears from her forehead. Her eyes flicker up to meet his, warm and amused. “You’re no fun at all,” she murmurs with something like affection in her voice. Then she takes a breath and looks away from him to glance back at the Commander, and the set of her shoulders relaxes. “I’ll do my best, sir,” she says to him.

The senior staff meet almost daily, in the Commander’s quarters. There’s the small side space there that they’d once used as a media center, and it has enough room for a little round table if they’re all willing to put up with the curved high-backed sofas that barely fit around it. It’s an exercise that involves a lot of coordination just to get the five of them settled, which Bradford is fairly certain is the point: all of them work better with each other after the required casual negotiation necessary to get them all into place. If there were chairs, he thinks rather wryly, they’d each be self-sufficient and isolated. Instead, there are two curved sofas with only one real place left open to enter or exit the table, which requires them to take turns and gesture at each other and comment on who will sit where and in what order, and it’s a mundane little social task that leaves them all more at ease with each other for the rest of the meeting.

They settle into a routine quickly: small habits and unspoken rules that quickly become absent-minded rituals. The meetings vary wildly. Some days they seem like a mere formality — no one has anything to report, or Kelly’s ready to take a team groundside, and the Commander goes through his brief check-ins and releases them all back to their duties within fifteen minutes. On other days, though, people come to the table with issues and requests and notes, and the meetings can take hours. 

Shen brings diagrams and Tygan brings tablets scrolling with data points, and both chief scientist and chief engineer make their arguments for why they need more people and more resources. The Avenger can only support so many staff members, and it’s a delicate balance between which team receives the next open slot at any given point; they eye each other with not-quite-concealed distaste and bargain for supply drops and berthing spaces. But they also bring more information to go with their requests: Shen’s improving the Avenger daily, and works with the soldiers to give each individual recruit the proper arms and armor. Tygan is managing three labs at once: a research lab devoted to figuring out all the unknowns the aliens bring with them, a science lab desperately trying to determine how to apply the research they decipher, and a trio of medical doctors tasked with keeping everyone on the Avenger alive and breathing.

Bradford brings intelligence from resistance settlements and all the information required to plan groundside missions. Kelly tends to be quiet in the meetings, which at first surprises Bradford and then annoys him. She’d always been comfortable reporting to him before, ready to bring up issues and willing to voice her concerns without fear. He’d been counting on her to retain that pragmatic approach in these meetings, but instead she keeps her mouth shut, even when he can see that she disagrees with someone else at the table. It takes him over a week to put the pieces together: she’s uncertain of her new status. He can’t quite believe his own conclusion, but after watching her spend the better part of two weeks silent with none of the little commentary he’s used to hearing from her, he can’t come up with another reason for her abrupt behavior change. 

It takes him two more days before he can manage to get Kelly alone to talk with her about it, which annoys him. He’s so used to sharing space with her that it’s frustrating to have to remember that the Avenger is a small ship and that privacy is hard to come by. He doesn’t want to simply order her up for an official meeting to confront her with this, though that would certainly solve the problem — for all he’s her superior officer, that feels like taking advantage of his rank in a way that seems unfair.

Instead, he catches her eye when she steps into the mess hall, and deliberately sets his cup down a good six inches past his plate on the table in front of him when she glances his way. Kelly’s eyes narrow very briefly. A few minutes later, she sets her tray of food down across from him at the table, and he moves his cup out of her way. 

“Central,” she greets him, sounding amused that he had resorted to using some of their old undercover codes to signal her. But she responds in kind: she passes her napkin from her left hand to her right, and sets it casually on the table beside her tray.

“Kelly,” he returns. Her first name is Jane, he recalls dimly, but he can’t remember her ever using it: for as long as he’s known her, she’s gone by her surname. He doesn’t say anything else to her out loud, but he adjusts his napkin a few inches right to reassure her that all is well. 

She nods again at his movement, understanding the code behind it, and they eat in companionable silence, broken by the occasional casual question or response. 

The two of them sharing a meal isn’t entirely unusual. Kelly makes a point of eating with her various squadmates when she can, and for all Bradford dislikes company at his table, he tries to occasionally be social and sit with his bridge officers. Still, being on the senior staff means that for better or worse they’re both more unapproachable than they would have been otherwise, and at times, it’s more comfortable for everyone else around them if they keep to themselves and don’t try to fraternize with the people they lead. It means Bradford is growing used to eating with Tygan and Shen and the Commander; Kelly, at least, is already a familiar meal partner, though this is the first time he’s used code to specifically invite her to sit with him.

They talk about work, in quick and vague words, knowing that every sentence they utter is heard by the other members of XCOM sitting all around them. It’s hardly malicious eavesdropping, but two members of the senior staff sharing a meal together in the general mess hall is a chance for the more observant listeners to glean new information from casual conversation. So instead of asking Kelly anything important, Bradford makes sure they only talk about safe subjects, and dinner passes quickly. 

As he finishes his meal, he pushes back his chair. “Want to get that inspection out of the way now?” he asks her.

Her expression doesn’t so much as flicker, though she’s surely well aware that there’s no real inspection requiring their attention. “Sure thing,” she says, and they return their trays and make their way out of the mess hall together.

Bradford leads them down a few decks, and she matches him step for step at his side in silence until he brings them down to the unused practice range below the armory. “So,” she says, waiting as he moves forward to deal with the hatch. “What’s going on?”

He unlocks the hatch door, and hauls it open. “Just a talk,” he says, and gestures for her to go ahead of him into the range. “One I figured we shouldn’t have with an audience.”

She pauses almost imperceptibly as she steps through the hatch into the gun range. “And what,” she asks rather warily as she turns to wait for him to join her, “do we need to talk about without an audience?”

Bradford stills with his hand on the hatch’s overhead, halfway through stepping into the range. He is suddenly aware that the two of them are now alone for the first time in several weeks, and apart from any prying eyes for the first time in over a month. It has been four weeks and some days since he last kissed her, his brain reminds him in intense and vivid detail, and Bradford has to steady himself for a split-second as his eyes move to Kelly’s mouth before he can prevent the glance.

Getting her alone for this conversation, he reflects uneasily, was not perhaps his wisest decision.

Still, after that thankfully brief hesitation, he steps through the hatch and swings it shut behind him. They are both professionals, he reminds himself, and they no longer have scrutiny and stress and fear driving their behavior. He stands straighter for the reminder, and locks the hatch closed with steady hands before he turns toward Kelly. It’s dim in the empty range, but he’s familiar with Kelly’s face after months of working with her. He watches her eyes dart to the hatch as it locks into place, and he can see how her gaze follows his hand up his arm and across his shoulders before she swings her eyes back up to meet his.

Kelly deserves his honesty, and he doesn’t want to think about what else he might say to her now that they are safe from all potential interference, so he faces her directly. To keep his hands occupied, he crosses his arms, and bluntly, makes his point. “I want to know why you don’t speak up in the daily meetings.”

She blinks in response, rapidly, and he can almost see her brain changing gears. “What?” she asks.

He repeats himself, and waits, watching her.

Kelly takes a deep, slow breath, and to give her credit, she doesn’t try to look away from his direct gaze. “I was under the assumption,” she says carefully, “that it wasn’t appropriate.”

Bradford snorts, and uncrosses his arms. “Since when?” he demands. “You’ve never been shy with your opinions before — that’s half of why I wanted you on the senior team. You were never afraid to bring up issues when we were working together.”

“That was just us,” she shoots back. “I know how to work with you.”

“So learn how to work with Shen and Tygan,” Bradford orders. “You’ve been friends with Shen for ages, and Tygan’s been around for years.”

“It’s not Shen and Tygan I’m worried about,” Kelly mutters, and she actually brings up her hands to rub at her face with her palms, a nervous gesture he hasn’t seen from her in months. “Look, I was never in the military. I don’t have a clue how to act in a briefing with the Commander, what I’m supposed to say or do or not do around him. He’s an admiral and you’re a general and I’m apparently a captain. I don’t know what to do with military stuff, or how I’m supposed to treat commanding officers.”

Bradford is amused at her nerves despite himself. It’s not that he can’t empathize — he remembers being a green officer himself, and how jittery he’d been the first time he’d worked with the Commander. But ever since he’s known her, Kelly has always seemed confident in herself: this crack in her very self-contained facade is the first real sign he’s had in a long time to remind him that for all her poise, she doesn’t have formal experience with an organized XCOM. She’s more used to the unofficial rough-and-tumble resistance; the transition back toward the old XCOM, with military ranks and orders and official procedures, is clearly not easy for her.

Because he’s not entirely unsympathetic, even if he does find the whole thing probably more entertaining than she’d like, Bradford points out, “Look, just forget about all the ranks. You’ve worked with me as a commanding officer just fine these past five years, and you’ve always been willing to call me out.”

“Yes,” she agrees without hesitation, “but I trust you.”

He can hear the raw honesty in her voice, and her instant acknowledgment of her faith in him sparks through him like lightning. Not that he didn’t think she trusted him, Bradford realizes on a sharp breath, but he never expected her to actually declare so out loud so directly. His chest tightens, and as if she recognizes that perhaps she spoke too bluntly, Kelly looks away from him.

With her gaze fixed firmly on some point behind his shoulder, she continues in a quieter voice. “Look,” she says. “You know me. You know where I came from — you brought me in when Vahlen sent me over, you remember how awful I was with being part of a team at first, you know my background and what I can handle and what I can’t. And I’ve worked with you enough that you’re — I know you,” she amends, in place of whatever she had started to say. “I know how you act and how you lead and how you forget to cover your right side when you get stressed. Hell,” and her mouth curves, just a little, as her brown eyes slide back to his. “I know more about you than I probably should know about my commanding officer.”

“Kelly,” Bradford says, and steps toward her. He reaches for her before he really gives himself permission to do so. He’s not entirely sure how much of his urge to touch her comes from leftover habits from their last mission, where he’d used physical contact so often to help keep them both on an even keel, and how much is because he just wants to hold her. His hands slide down her shoulders, and come to a rest on her upper arms.

Her own hands come up, and at first he thinks Kelly’s got enough common sense to push him away, to reject his touch as something lingering on past the mission that once required it. But instead, her fingers reach out slowly to touch him just below his collarbone. She looks up at him as she deliberately flattens her palms against his chest. Even in the dim light, he can count the dark freckles spread across her cheekbones like stars on her skin. “I trust you,” she says again, plaintive and soft and deliberate. “I know where I stand with you. I don’t have that with anyone else in that briefing room except for maybe Lily.”

Bradford considers her point as they stand together. His thumbs rub in slow half-circles against her sleeves, almost absently, but when he answers her, his words are carefully chosen and practical. “I asked the Commander to promote you to the senior staff for a reason,” he says at last. “You’ve earned your place. You’re the best operative we’ve got, and you see things the rest of us miss. There’s a reason you lead our groundside missions, and there’s a reason why I want you involved in those meetings. You’re the only other one I can rely on in that group to notice what needs to be brought up — Shen and Tygan are good,” he’s quick to add, “but they don’t think about the groundside details, and the Commander and I can’t catch everything. That’s why I wanted to bring you in. I need you to step up and start speaking out again, like you used to when it was just you and me going through intel.” And, to give her back a part of the obvious respect she’s offered him, he admits, “I trust you. I trust your opinions. I can’t be the only one in there willing to disagree with people when they make a wrong call — I need you to speak up when you see something you don’t like.”

Her sigh is quiet, and she shuts her eyes. “You realize you’re basically giving me permission to argue with you,” she points out, obviously considering his words.

He can’t help but smile. “Since when have you needed permission for that?” he asks. He wants to lift a hand from her arm, to touch her cheek and feel her skin under his fingertips and watch her look up at him with heavy-lidded eyes. Because that desire has absolutely nothing to do with what they’re talking about and can’t even be blamed on months together undercover, Bradford instead pulls his hands away from her completely to escape the temptation.

“Fair enough,” Kelly mutters, and her eyes open, clear and bright even in the practice range’s dim light. As he steps back, her arms drop, the contact between them lost, and he regrets it even as he knows it’s the safer option. She gives him a nod. “I’ll see what I can do, Central.”

Bradford almost winces at her sudden switch to professionalism. He opens his mouth to remind her that he does have a name, not just a call-sign, but he can’t quite bring himself to say that to her, not with her arms loose at her sides and his hands struggling not to touch her again. “Look, you trust me,” he says instead. “And I trust the Commander. You will too, once you get to know him, but if you can’t trust him yourself just yet, at least trust my opinion of him.”

Her lips quirk. “What, you want me to argue with him the way I’d argue with you?”

Picturing that makes him actually grin. “He’d love that, actually,” Bradford confirms. “Just treat him like you’d treat me.”

The instant those words leave his mouth, though, he realizes just how wrong they are. Kelly, to her credit, recognizes his mistake as swiftly as he does. Her smile spreads, slow and satisfied, and she takes a single daring step closer to him.

“No,” she murmurs, looking up at him, near enough to kiss, and there’s an undercurrent in her voice that he can’t quite decipher. “Not quite just like you.”

Bradford wants to touch her, to gather her in his arms so he can feel her body pressed against his. He wants to drag her close against him and kiss her until she calls him by name and not by call-sign. He wants to feel her tremble against him and hear her breath catch in her throat and feel her fingers tug against his skin with urgent, greedy need.

He wants her, simply and powerfully, and because his want is so achingly intense, he can’t look away from her.

“No,” he agrees unsteadily instead, fighting the urge to touch her. “Not quite.”

He doesn’t kiss her. He has just that much control left. There are too many reasons why he shouldn’t, though at the moment none of them seem important. He hauls in a breath, unable to look away from her where she stands in front of him, and tries to remind himself why he can’t simply frame her face in his hands and kiss her until the rest of the world doesn’t matter. And there are reasons, his sluggish and distracted brain attempts to acknowledge: he’s technically her superior officer, they’re both probably still influenced by months of undercover work, he’s more than a decade older than her, and he’s too old and bitter to be any kind of good for her.

Her face is shadowed as she looks up at him, so near but too far, and he looks down at her and wonders if she misses his company as much as he misses hers. Neither of them move. They stand facing each other, not quite together but intrinsically connected, unwilling to move back but unable to move forward.

Kelly escapes the tension between them first. Her eyes lower, and she takes a breath that sounds suddenly loud against the emptiness of the practice range. “Well,” she says, and can’t seem to find anything else to say. But it’s enough to break the building strain between them, and Bradford hauls in a breath of his own.

It is better not to touch her. Bradford tells himself this as swallows down desire. He takes the coward’s way out.

“So,” he says, and it sounds strained even to his own ears. “I leave my right side open, you said?”

Kelly’s eyes shut, so swiftly it might have only been a blink. But something in her expression has shifted when they open again. She steps past him toward the hatch to the hallway. The smile she gives him is warm, even amused, and somehow too impersonal. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Usually just when you’re stressed.” 

He watches her work the hatch lock and the fasteners, and waits for her to step out into the hallway beyond before he follows her. “I’ll work on it,” he promises as he emerges into the brighter light of the hallway.

“Good,” she says, and she gives him one small glance that holds a wealth of meaning in it before she starts to make her way down the hallway. “I will, too.”

It’s safer to let her leave on her own, and so Bradford takes his time securing the hatch behind them. His heart is pounding. He tells himself sternly that he has no reason to feel disappointed with their conversation: he made the point he’d meant to, and Kelly will hopefully start being more active in the morning meetings. Any regret he feels about not kissing her, he reminds himself, is just bleeding over from their undercover assignment, and he should be relieved that they’re both starting to move on now that they’re not trapped together.

But he doesn’t feel relief, just frustration, and he spends more time than he ought to replaying their conversation in his head, thinking of what he might have said or done differently to achieve a result he really shouldn’t imagine so hungrily.

Still, in the meeting the next morning, he watches Kelly take a deep breath and lay both of her hands flat on the table. “No,” she says firmly as the Commander continues to explain his proposal.

The Commander pauses in mid-sentence, clearly surprised by her abrupt disagreement. “No?” he repeats, voice dangerously neutral.

Kelly’s nod is small and contained. “No. We don’t need everyone carrying one of those things.” She gestures at the blueprints lying across the table. “It’s going to require a fair amount of speed and luck to get close enough to an officer for that thing to work, and there’s no guarantee it’ll leave the officer uncooperative in the process. I don’t want to pass those out to everyone and turn it into a free-for-all. People are going to get hurt.” Almost as an afterthought, she tacks on a polite, “Sir.”

Pride sears through Bradford so strong and so fast that he nearly can’t breathe. Because he knows the Commander well, he can read amusement, even something like delight, in the way the Commander tilts his head to consider Kelly. Shen, at Kelly’s side, is all but gaping at the other woman for so completely disagreeing with their esteemed leader; even Tygan coughs politely, and adjusts his glasses as an excuse to look away.

“And what do you suggest, Menace?” the Commander asks quietly.

Kelly doesn’t flinch, though he can see her take another careful breath. “Make one,” she says simply. “Give it to me. I’ll see what I can do with it. After a few tests runs, we can come up with a short list of who we trust with them. But I don’t want everyone on the ground carrying one of these. I think it’s a recipe for disaster.”

Bradford doesn’t disagree with her assessment. He can see the Commander’s point — if everyone is carrying one of these new weapons, the odds of someone being in place to use one will rise. But he can see Kelly’s concern as well, and is glad she’s picked this point to make her first stand. Satisfaction wells up in him, fierce and warm: he’d asked her to risk doing this, and she’s proved her trust in him by willingly shouldering the burden he wanted her to carry. It’s exactly what he hoped she would do, and Bradford can’t help but feel proud as he sees her stepping up to the task at his request.

“Fair enough,” the Commander says mildly, and offers Kelly a faint smile. “One skulljack, Dr. Shen. We’ll reassess after it’s been tested in the field.”

“Yes, sir,” Shen agrees, still regarding Kelly dubiously. 

Kelly’s smile is small and contained, and she looks down at her hands for a moment, then curls them back up off the table and into her lap. When she looks up, Bradford isn’t surprised that her eyes find his across the table.

“Good,” he says shortly, and then, quieter, “Thank you.”

She nods at him, and there’s a twist of acknowledgment in her smile as she looks away. Her pleased little smirk sends something warm spreading through his chest: he asked it of her, he thinks, and she trusted him enough to speak up despite her reservations. He’s more touched by it than he expected. 

After the Commander ends the meeting and the five of them have left the briefing table, he makes a point of catching Kelly’s elbow as she tries to slip unobtrusively out the door behind Shen and Tygan. Her eyes, when she looks up at him, are wary.

His hand is tight around her elbow; he deliberately loosens his grip. “Good job,” he tells her again. His voice softens despite himself. “Thanks.”

The smile she offers him only reminds him why he likes her: confident, amused, dependable. “I trust you,” she says again, and her gaze flickers past him to behind them, where the Commander is frowning at a tablet, completely preoccupied with the data scrolling across it. “He’s not mad?” she asks, dropping her voice further, and he has the sense that she’s almost reluctant to voice the question and betray the nerves she’s successfully conquered.

Bradford snorts, and lets go of her arm. “He’s thrilled,” he says.

Kelly eyes the Commander doubtfully. “If you say so,” she assesses after a moment, and she turns away. “I’ll see you around, Central.” 

He can’t help himself. “I do have a name, you know,” he says to her back as she leaves.

She pauses a bare step away. When she looks at him, there’s something dark and promising in her eyes that makes his gut clench in expectation. “Yes,” she acknowledges quietly. “I know.” Her mouth twists, amusement or regret or something else entirely, and though it looks as though she’s tempted to say something more, she turns away without speaking again.

He watches her leave with anticipation coiled tight in his chest. Not the response he expected, he thinks, but not a denial, and he didn’t precisely ask her anything, after all. Still, he’s perfectly satisfied as he walks back to the Commander and the briefing table, energized again and eager to move forward.


	18. 04-03: Acquiring Inspiration

# Acquisitions

## Section 4: Winning the Present

### Chapter 3: Acquiring Inspiration

“Central,” Kelly says over the radio, and Bradford finds his attention snapping to how her voice sounds just a bit different than usual — not quite strained, but definitely tinged with something guarded. “If you’ve got the time, you might want to head groundside once the Avenger is in place. There’s an old friend of yours here that wants to say hello.”

The Commander looks up from the board in surprise. Bradford doesn’t even bother to mask his own confusion. “Copy that, Menace,” he says in return. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Old friend?” the Commander asks.

Bradford frowns as he starts the Avenger’s landing sequence. Flying the Avenger isn’t precisely easy, but it’s not awful: there’s a decent autopilot, Shen’s done a fairly good job at creating a rather comprehensive instruction manual for the craft’s piloting systems, and best of all, he’s got two other bridge officers in training to handle the job so he’s not the only one able to manage it. “I have absolutely no idea,” he says, keeping an eye on the readouts as he carefully directs the Avenger over the smoking ruins of the small resistance settlement. 

The Commander considers that. “A trap, do you think?” he wonders.

Bradford waits until he has the Avenger safely parked on the outskirts of the settlement before he responds. “Don’t think so,” he says, locking the ship down. “She didn’t use any of our usual codes for that.”

The Commander raises his eyebrows. “You have codes for that?” he questions mildly.

Bradford snorts without much humor. “We’ve gone undercover together too many times to count,” he points out dryly. “We’ve got codes for everything.” He toggles the radio one more time. “Menace, you want to give me a little more to go on?”

She keys her radio just early enough that he catches the echo of laughter in her words. “She’s asking after Ann and Brian,” she says, and that’s all.

Bradford brings a hand up to massage his temple. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he says, and laughs before he can help it. The noise startles two of the command center’s other officers into giving him wide-eyed glances; he is not prone to levity in general, much less actually laughing out loud on the bridge of the Avenger. “Copy that, Menace; I’m on my way.”

“Ann and Brian?” the Commander asks, mystified. “What’s that code for?”

Bradford just shakes his head. “Long story,” he says. “Long, long story.” He pushes himself away from the piloting console. “Can you spare me for a few minutes?”

The Commander waves a hand, clearly bemused. “Go right ahead,” he allows. “I want to hear that story when you’re done, though.”

“I can do that,” Bradford agrees, and makes his way down several decks to the cargo hold. The loading ramp is slowly lowering, and there’s a grim-faced group of people waiting for it to touch down so that they can disembark the Avenger and get to work.

The resistance settlement had unofficially been known as Sterling: it was based out of some old silver mines in the remnants of Nevada, and about half of it was underground. It had made rooting out the ADVENT infiltration troops near impossible, though that same difficulty had kept the civilians for the most part isolated from the actual troopers sent in to try to wipe the settlement from the map.

Still, it isn’t a pretty picture as Bradford steps off the Avenger and into the settlement. There is the acrid tang of smoke in the air, and buildings are still burning. Wreckage and the dead alike are piled against walls and corners, and the remaining settlement survivors are dirty and stunned, glassy-eyed with shock and trembling in rage or fear.

Kelly is easy enough to find; Kleiner points out which way she’d gone, and so Bradford picks his way across a scrub-filled clearing towards a ramshackle collection of huts. Kelly stands speaking to one of the settlement survivors there, resting in a carefully non-threatening pose, her shotgun clipped to the quick-release at her hip and her hands casual and loose at her sides.

Bradford deliberately scuffs his boots in the dirt for a few steps as he approaches her to give her some notice of his arrival, and she looks up at the warning. The woman she’s talking to looks up as well, and it takes Bradford a few seconds to recognize her as Rachel Nettles, even with Kelly’s warning.

The Rachel Nettles he remembers was perfect and pristine, with carefully coiffed blonde hair and perfectly manicured nails. She’d worn almost exclusively exquisitely tailored white pantsuits, and she’d had the laid-back and contented look of someone well-satisfied with her life.

This Rachel Nettles is dirty, dressed in a worn and tattered jumpsuit that clearly once belonged to someone far bigger than her. Her nails are broken, and her hair is choppy and short, a fine fringe around her head. She still retains the cold beauty of someone who had been able to afford excellent plastic surgery, but she’s no longer lushly curved or quite so haughty. She looks happier, though, just as satisfied with her lot in life and far more comfortable with it.

Her face breaks into a genuine smile when she looks up to see him, and Bradford is surprised to realize that he’s smiling himself as he steps up to the two women.

“Brian Smith,” Nettles says in greeting, and then her smile turns wry and self-deprecating. “I know that’s wrong, but I don’t know what else to call you. I mean, I have some idea, but…”

It has been a very long time since anyone has actually called him by his name; at his side, Kelly looks down to suppress what might be a smile, small and private. “John Bradford,” he offers Nettles all the same, ignoring the urge to glance at Kelly to track her reaction to his real name. He extends his hand for Nettles to shake. 

“I thought that was you,” Nettles says, beaming up at him. Her grip is firm. “I mean, I suspected, occasionally, but I was never really sure.” And her smile turns sheepish as she releases his hand. “I suppose I hoped, mostly. I was never quite certain about you until I dug up some old intelligence about XCOM about a year after we’d been neighbors, but they had a few pictures of you, and aside from the scar, it was a pretty good match.”

Bradford grimaces, suddenly once more aware of the vertical cut marring the right side of his face. He doesn’t think about it often — usually just when shaving, which if he’s honest, he isn’t as religious about nowadays as he should be. “There’s a reason I don’t do undercover assignments often,” he acknowledges honestly. 

Nettles’s smile is almost a smirk. “I did wonder,” she admits. “Some of your behavior, too, some of what you said — well, I did a lot of research on EXALT for my novels, and it just seemed off.” She turns a more speculative gaze on Kelly. “I was never quite so sure about you, though — I couldn’t find anything about you in XCOM’s old records, and you never slipped up enough for me to catch anything.” 

Kelly’s grin is faintly satisfied. “There’s a reason I go out on assignments with him,” she teases, and Bradford likes the crinkle of laugh-lines around her eyes when she glances up at him. “Someone’s got to compensate for how awful he is undercover.”

“Hey,” he protests mildly, unoffended because she’s speaking the truth. He looks down at her, unable to keep himself from teasing right back. “Be nice.”

Kelly’s eyes spark. “Make me,” she dares, and then Bradford watches her catch herself. She looks away, and regains her composure in the span of two quick blinks. Nettles, he thinks, has thrown off her sense of equilibrium; they’re both slipping too easily back into the banter they’d shared in front of her before. Instead, despite the spark of lighthearted flirting in Kelly’s eyes, she looks back up at him and regains her professionalism. “Rachel has been working with Sterling for almost four months now,” she says, filling him in on what they must have already talked about without him. Bradford does the math to realize that Nettles must have joined Sterling bare days after Unification Day for that timeline to work. “She’s got some veterinary skills, and they have a couple of horses here still.”

“And nine cats and three dogs,” Nettles adds with justifiable pride. “My husband was a vet. I helped him out occasionally, before the — well, before.” 

That explains more than it doesn’t, Bradford thinks: the Purges saw most domesticated animals destroyed, and most animal lovers hadn’t reacted well to that. More veterinarians and crazy cat ladies and devoted environmentalists had been killed in protests than expected; the aliens had been forced to space out the Purges over a span of about six years because of that.

He wonders what had happened to her husband. 

“And you’re doing all right, off the grid?” he asks instead.

Nettles grimaces, and despite the fact that her hair is so short it can’t possibly be in her eyes, she sweeps her bangs back from her forehead in what is clearly a habitual gesture. “All right,” she agrees. “It’s a change, but not a bad one. And I’m useful here.” Her smile is slow, and almost sly. “I’m still writing, actually — Amanda O’Neil has a way of releasing my books on the net to get them out into the public. I figured I should at least try to put my talents to use for the right cause these days — and it’s nice to write what I want to, for once. Though,” and she colors, suddenly awkward, and Bradford thinks she winces. “I think I might owe you two an apology. I, ah, might have based a book off of you.”

Kelly’s lips twitch upwards. “Oh, don’t tell me,” she murmurs, but anything else she was going to say is cut off by a quick report from the radio.

“All teams, we have a priority two alert from Sector Six — Cooper, we’ll leave your team behind for recovery. Menace, get your team back on board; Sounder, same.” The Commander’s voice is tight and grim. “Central, back on the bridge. I want us in the air in fifteen minutes.”

“Copy, Commander,” Kelly says at the same moment Bradford replies, “Understood.”

They glance at each other, and then turn as one back to Nettles. “Time to go,” Kelly says without apology. “We’ll have to stay in touch — for real this time, though. It’s good to see you again, Rachel, now that we’re officially on the same side.”

“I’m glad to see you both again,” Nettles agrees, and then her smile spreads. “And I’m glad you’re still, you know, together. Even with all this. I wasn’t sure if you two actually really were together or not underneath it all, but I kind of hoped that — well.” And her smile turns sheepish. “I mean, I do write romance novels. I like happy endings.”

Kelly glances up at him, and he can read the question in her eyes. Bradford meets her gaze for a second, and then turns back to Nettles. “Yeah,” he lies, deciding glossing over everything is easier than attempting to explain everything in the little time they have left seems pointless. “We tend to stick together.”

“Good,” she says solidly. “Good luck, John. And Ann — you’re not Ann, really, are you?”

“Kelly,” she says, and Bradford’s so used to simply thinking of her by her surname that it takes him a few seconds to realize she didn’t introduce herself by her first name.

“Kelly,” Nettles repeats, sounding satisfied. “Good luck. I’m glad to know you’re doing well.”

“Goodbye, Rachel,” Kelly says. “And stay safe. I’ll comm you when I can.”

It doesn’t take them long to reach the safety of the Avenger again. Teams and personnel are already hurrying back aboard, and Cooper stands at the foot of the loading ramp directing half a dozen assistants as they hurry to finish unloading the recovery supplies. “Rachel Nettles,” Bradford says to Kelly as they step back up the ramp together. “Not what I expected.”

Kelly laughs, honest and open. “Not even remotely,” she agrees, and they share an amused glance before he heads towards the bridge once more and she gathers her team to take them up to the armory.

Sector Six is a mess, and by the time they arrive to deal with it, things have gone from bad to worse. Kelly and her team suit up and hit the ground hard and fast, but it’s a long slog of a mission for everyone involved. It’s nine stressful and intense hours before the Skyranger reports a safe pick-up of Kelly’s whole squad: Kelly’s got a bullet through her arm, making her the least wounded of her team, and two of her squadmates didn’t make it back to the Skyranger under their own power. 

They hold the mission debrief in medical, which annoys the three actual physicians Tygan’s managed to recruit, all of whom maintain that the injured soldiers need rest, not interrogation. Kelly sits perched on the side of her second-in-command’s hospital bed, her bandaged arm in a sling. Kleiner’s likely to need knee reconstruction, and they’re all well aware that he’s going to be out of commission for the foreseeable future. The Commander stands in the center of medical, turning on the balls of his feet to listen to soldiers offering him their reports from their medical beds; Bradford props himself against the wall by the door, and tries to keep his eye on Kelly, who wavers where she sits without seeming to realize she’s not entirely stable.

It’s a short debrief, mostly because the mission itself was so long — there had hardly been any time to rest between the retaliation strike against Sterling and the Sector Six disaster, and looking around the medical bay, Bradford can count that cost in occupied medical beds.

Kelly’s really the only mobile one out of her entire squad, and Bradford knows she’s going back to the barracks for the night less because it’s going to be more comfortable for her to sleep in her own bunk and more because every other bed in medical is already taken. Such is the price of light wounds and leadership, he thinks rather ruefully as one of the doctors deftly slides a needle into her bandaged arm. She waits passively for the doctor to finish without flinching as he checks on her bandaged gunshot wound, but Bradford sees her wince as she slides off Kleiner’s bed to the floor afterward. He’s about to offer her a hand when the Commander steps forward unexpectedly to do so himself.

“Let’s take it easy there, Menace,” he says cheerfully, though there’s serious intent behind his words. “That medication is going to kick in with a vengeance here in a minute, and it’s been a long day.” 

“Yeah,” she says, and she even sounds tired. Her eyes flicker across the hospital beds, a leader double-checking her troops at the end of the day, and it straightens her spine a little. “Let’s hope we don’t have another day like this one anytime soon.”

“You nailed both objectives,” Bradford feels the need to point out. “And brought everyone back alive.”

“That’s true,” Kelly agrees, her eyes brightening a bit even if her words are starting to slur slightly from the impressive painkillers, which he suspects are the only thing still keeping her upright. “But still. I could live without doing this again.”

The Commander laughs, and very carefully takes her uninjured arm. “Come on then, Menace,” he says gently. “Let’s get you settled.”

Bradford sticks with them because he doesn’t know what else to do: he’s next to useless, of course, as Kelly is decently mobile and doesn’t need another man at her side directing her towards her bunk. So he trails along behind them as the Commander gently steers her through the ship towards the soldiers’ barracks.

“We ought to see about getting you your own quarters,” the Commander muses as Kelly indicates which bunk is hers.

Kelly’s laugh is brief. “This is fine,” she assures him, and steps away from his guiding arm. Her bunk is nearest the door, one of the lower ones. It had been Bradford’s bunk once, close to four years ago, before he’d moved to his own quarters away from the barracks. Bradford has no doubt that she chose it for the same reason he had: it’s the closest bottom bunk to the door, and being located there makes it easier for her to tumble to her feet and run for the armory in case of a midnight emergency. 

The are other off-duty soldiers in the barracks, though the cheerful and rather raucous conversation that had been going when they’d entered has stopped. Now a small woman with bone-white hair steps forward as Kelly carefully eases herself down on the edge of her bottom bunk. “Sir,” the woman acknowledges politely, nodding at the Commander, but then she looks at Kelly. “What’s the word?” she asks.

“He’ll be fine,” Kelly answers, staring down at her boots. “He’s a little banged up — they all are — but they’ll be fine.” She looks up at the concerned woman’s face, and smiles at her — a wavering, mostly reassuring smile that doesn’t hide the fact that she’s still in some pain despite the massive amount of drugs clearly coursing through her system. “Briefing’s over. He wouldn’t mind a visitor, I don’t think.”

The white-haired woman gives Kelly a grateful nod but no other response; she turns on her heels and all but bolts for the door. The rest of the soldiers come to a consensus, and gather together to follow her: they’re probably not all going down to medical, Bradford thinks, but they’re kind enough to clear out of the barracks to give Kelly some quiet and the rest she clearly needs.

Kelly holds onto the edge of her bunk, half-teetering, and makes an aborted effort to lean down to unlace her boots with her good hand. It’s clearly a poor idea, judging by her grimace. Bradford takes pity on her, and steps forward. Without asking permission or even speaking, he crouches down in front of her, and with quick blunt fingers, tugs at her boot laces. 

“What was that about?” the Commander asks, watching the doorway as the barracks empty.

She’s having difficulty keeping her eyes open, and Bradford’s not too surprised given how many painkillers she’s probably on. Her good hand comes up to his shoulder to steady herself as he hauls off her first boot. “That’s Kleiner’s wife,” Kelly manages to explain. “She’s probably just worried about him. She wants to start coming groundside with us, once you clear her for duty.”

“That’s her?” And the Commander sounds surprised. He turns back from the doorway to glance around the empty barracks, then looks back at Kelly. “Hm. Not what I pictured, actually.”

Kelly’s fingers curl against Bradford’s shoulder as he moves on to her other boot; her thumb brushes the bare skin at his neck. His skin tingles beneath her touch, and Bradford does his best to ignore it. “What’s her deal?” Bradford asks. He can hear the Irish more now in Kelly’s voice — she’s pumped full of drugs, and he’s honestly surprised she’s still more or less upright.

Kelly makes a motion that turns into a canceled shrug as her arm is caught in her sling. “Don’t really know,” she says. “Psionic. She showed up about a month ago looking for Sigfried. Tygan’s been dealing with her.”

Bradford pulls off her second boot, and though he’s enjoying where her fingers rest on his shoulder, he shifts and her hand slides away. “Bed,” he orders her, lifting her feet up and pushing them to the end of her bunk. She lets him help turn her body, and he thinks he can hear a sigh of relief as she squirms into place, her arm still carefully kept in place by the sling. “And get at least eight hours of rest,” he adds.

He’s fairly sure she rolls her eyes and isn’t sure what he said to deserve that reaction. “Yes, Central,” she says obediently enough, stretching herself out carefully on her bunk. Still, it’s easy to see the tension leave her frame as she settles down onto her thin mattress. “Hit the light on your way out, would you?”

Bradford wants to touch her again — her hand, maybe, where it lies at her side, or her too-pale cheeks where her dark freckles are even more pronounced than usual. If the Commander weren’t standing at his side, he’s not sure he would have resisted the impulse; as it is, he crosses his arms to keep his hands from wandering. “Get some sleep,” he orders, instead of all the things he might have said if the Commander weren’t with them.

The Commander agrees with him, and he does reach forward to pat her hand where it rests at the edge of the bunk. His hand is large and dark over hers, and he very gently pats her bruised fingers. Bradford finds himself envious of that contact. “You did a good job, Menace,” the older man says with a smile. “You’re off-duty until further notice.”

“Okay,” she says drowsily. “Thanks, Commander. Night, Central.”

Bradford turns away as her eyes flutter shut, because he remembers all too well how she looks when she sleeps and doesn’t need more visions of her in repose to taunt his dreams. The Commander turns with him, and ghosts his palm over the lights sensor as they step out of the barracks and into the brightly-lit hallway beyond it.

“Hell of a day,” Bradford offers as they continue down the hallway, because he feels like he needs to say something.

“Hell of a day,” the Commander agrees with a long sigh. “And she’s had the worst of it. If we were doing things the old-fashioned way, I’d put her up for a commendation. As it is, I think I’d better promote her again.” He takes several more steps in silence, and then says abruptly, “I found a bottle of gin up in my quarters the other day. Want a drink?”

In the old XCOM — the military XCOM, the professional XCOM, the XCOM before the aliens conquered the world — Bradford had never shared drinks with the Commander. They’d taken plenty of meals together in the mess hall during their off-duty hours, and he’d considered the man a friend and a mentor. But there had never been anything as informal as drinks after a rough day of work.

He doesn’t like gin, but that’s no reason not to accept the offer. “Sure,” he agrees, and they turn their steps together towards Deck 7, where the Commander keeps his quarters.

It used to be the media room, and Bradford’s more used to attending briefings here than spending off-duty hours here. It’s odd, and slightly awkward, to settle down onto the couch and watch the Commander scour through his quarters for the bottle of gin and two glasses. He’s friends with this man, he realizes, and yet still knows so little about him. He’s not entirely sure how he should act around him when he doesn’t have his professional persona of Central to fall back on.

“Different now, isn’t it?” the Commander asks out of nowhere as he unscrews the bottle of gin. He pours two neat servings. 

Bradford forces himself to relax, and leans back against the couch. “What is?” he asks.

The Commander hands him a glass. “Everything, I suppose,” he answers. “You and me. Twenty years ago, you deferred to me a lot more.” He smile is wry. “Yes, Commander; no, Commander. You asked my opinion a lot more than you do today.” He holds up his hand almost immediately, to forestall anything Bradford might say. “It’s not a bad difference,” he’s quick to add. “You’re more used to command these days. It sits easier on you than it did before. It’s good to see. I always knew you had it in you — there’s a reason we were training you up.”

Bradford sips at his gin, refrains from grimacing at the taste of it, and struggles with a response. “I’m a better second,” he says at last. “I can keep things together well enough, but…”

The Commander’s laugh interrupts him. “Well enough?” he repeats, easing himself down onto the couch, the motion obviously still not quite comfortable for a man who’d awoken to an older, weaker body. “Central, you took XCOM completely underground and kept it alive for twenty years all on your own. I’d say that’s beyond well enough.”

Bradford stares at his gin. “Surviving isn’t the same as winning,” is all he can think to say.

“It can be,” his oldest friend counters.

He shakes his head. “Not if you want anything to change,” Bradford points out. Conversations he’s had in the past with Kelly surface in his memories, and help him marshal his thoughts into order. “Look, I kept XCOM up and running, but without you, there wasn’t a war. There were strategic retreats and a few good hits, but there wasn’t a real fight. That’s why we risked everything to get you back. Without you, we were never going to do more than hide in the shadows. With you, we’ve got a real chance at making a difference.”

“I’m flattered,” the Commander says seriously, and takes a sip of his gin. “But that’s a high expectation to live up to.”

“You haven’t let us down yet,” Bradford says honestly.

The Commander raises his glass in acknowledgment. “Same, Central,” he acknowledges. “And thanks to what you managed while I was gone, I think we’re in a pretty good place for me to live up to those expectations.”

The praise warms him, so that the smile he gives the Commander is both honest and pleased. “I had help,” Bradford says, trying to deflect the commendation. 

The Commander laughs, warm and rich. “You built a good team,” he admits. “Tygan’s no Vahlen, but he’s got her same drive if not her curiosity. Shen’s her father all over again, and Kelly makes a decent you when you give her half the chance. You built yourself your own senior team out of what you could, and I like the choices you made.” He lifts his glass again in another toast towards Bradford’s rather astonished expression. “Told you, you’re more used to command these days.”

Bradford considers his superior’s assessment of his team, and realizes with a bit of surprise that he’s right: for all this new XCOM is different and not at all like the XCOM he’d first known, when he’d stepped into the Commander’s shoes he’d done his best to build his command team exactly like the one he’d first been a part of. Chief engineer and chief scientist, he thinks, and someone practical enough to keep all the pieces in between moving. Still, he snorts into his gin. “I like being me a whole hell of a lot better than being you,” he mutters, and the Commander bellows with laughter at that, completely unoffended.

“Of course you do,” he says. “Heavy the head that wears the crown, and all that.”

The words are glib, but Bradford knows exactly what it feels like to order someone to their death: he’s done so accidentally, misjudging missions and assignments, and deliberately, knowing sacrifice is sometimes needed for a greater purpose to succeed. It’s a weight he’s learned to carry over the past twenty years, in a way he’d never understood before the first XCOM had fallen, and he’s unsurprised it’s left enough of a mark on him that the Commander can see it.

Still, he smiles ruefully at his friend and commanding officer. “We few,” he says, quoting despite himself. “We happy few.”

The Commander returns his smile in perfect understanding. “We band of brothers,” he finishes somberly, and holds out his glass. He meets Bradford’s eyes, waiting, offering.

Bradford understands the friendship he’s confirming as he clinks his own gin against his glass, and they drink the alcohol down in silence.


	19. 04-04: Acquiring Loss

# Acquisitions

## Section 4: Winning the Present

### Chapter 4: Acquiring Loss

Things can’t go right forever. It’s almost six months to the day after they retrieved the Commander when everything goes to hell.

The Commander is swearing, low and vicious, gripping the edges of the display, and Bradford can’t blame him. He stares at the battleground himself, working angles, creating and discarding half a dozen plans as he finds flaws with them, and can see no good way for this to end.

There’s a crackle of static, and then, tight with pain, Kelly’s voice breaks across the radio. “Commander,” she says, and coughs. Bradford knows she’s been shot at least once, and has been trying not to think about her injuries, but hearing her obviously suffering makes him wince. Still, the next thing she says eases his mind, because she coughs again, and then asks clearly, “PSP?”

He lifts his head from the display to see the Commander pause where he stands over it. His mouth is half-open, calculating, keeping tabs on everything below him, and her request clears a line from his furrowed brow. “Menace,” he says, “PSP granted.”

Kelly doesn’t say anything else, but since taking a plasma bolt to her gut, she’s been breathing hard and speaking only in short, agonized phrases. Bradford looks back down at the display, quickly finds her small figure tucked up against the side of the evacuation zone. She’s battered and bleeding, but pride swells up in him as he watches her force herself to her feet. She gestures to the large man beside her, and Kleiner makes a stumbling, limping break for the evac zone as Kelly lurches to her feet.

But instead of any of the barely-formed guesses Bradford predicted she’d act on, Kelly turns towards the enemies hemming them in, and moves towards them.

The Commander swears. “Menace, get your ass back to the evac zone,” he snaps into his mic, but it’s too late: Kelly has slung herself forward into a tight trio of enemies, and she’s pulled her glowing sword from her back.

She’s staying behind, Bradford realizes as he looks at the determined set of her shoulders, and there’s a roaring in his ears that must be the sound of his stomach dropping to his feet. She’s sacrificing herself to get her team to safety.

She kills two of the troopers outright, as Kleiner reaches Johnson and hauls him over his shoulder to the evac zone. The third trooper reaches her and pulls a sword of his own; she dodges his swing as Lin collects Verner’s body and drags it to the waiting Skyranger. Her own attack back at the stun lancer fails – she’s tired, Bradford thinks, and badly wounded, and “Goddamn it, Kelly, get to the evac,” he orders, forgetting to use her call-sign in his panic.

There’s enough static over the radio that her response is tinny and broken up. “Sorry,” she says, somehow parrying a second blow from her opponent. There’s a catch in her voice that he’s fairly sure isn’t the result of poor radio service. “Sorry.”

She kills the stun lancer just as a badly-limping Petronovski reaches the Skyranger and safety. She stumbles back three steps as a plasma bolt slams into her shoulder from a squad of troopers approaching from the west, and goes down to one knee. “Firebrand,” he hears her gasp through her comm. “Evac secure.”

“No!” 

Bradford and the Commander speak in unison, but there’s nothing else to be done. Firebrand doesn’t have the fuel or the shielding to risk a longer stay, and there are more transports inbound with ADVENT reinforcements. Kelly reloads her shotgun where she kneels, prepared to buy the Skyranger time to take off, and the Skyranger’s engines roar to life. Her only chance at escape leaves her behind to face a squad of fresh troopers, and the last drone is popped from the sky within seconds of the Skyranger’s take-off, rendering the display useless and Kelly’s final minutes unobserved.

The Commander rips off his radio and flings it into the wall. He paces, hands on his hips and head sunk down to his chest, and shouts, “Goddamn it!” to a suddenly silent bridge.

Bradford braces both of his hands on the edge of the display, and shuts his eyes.

No one on the bridge speaks. After a minute, Bradford opens his eyes. He feels… numb, he realizes. Stunned. Devastated.

Shen stands in the corner, out of the way of the combat operations. She’s covering her mouth with her hand and there are tears shimmering in her eyes. Tygan stands stiffly beside her, too awkward to offer her any support or comfort; his expression is more controlled than hers, but even he can’t hide the regret in his suddenly-tired face. Bridge officers wait at their stations, frozen into motionless uncertainty by what just happened.

The stillness is broken by Firebrand’s voice, loud and clear over the radio. “Final report,” Firebrand says, and her voice is heavy as she radios in the report that should have come from Kelly. “Mission objective completed, heavy casualties. Medical requested in the hangar bay.”

No one dares respond. Bradford pulls his headset out of his ear as she repeats her message so he doesn’t have to hear it again.

Shen turns with a quiet sob, and flees the room. The Commander heaves a heavy sigh, and walks across the bridge to collect his own headset from where he’d thrown it against the wall. He holds the mic up to his mouth. “Copy that, Firebrand,” he says shortly. “Medical is standing by.” 

Tygan nods, and turns away to organize a medical team to meet the Skyranger, and with his motion the bridge comes to life again.

“Goddamn it,” the Commander mutters again, and looks to Bradford. 

Bradford doesn’t say anything. He’s not sure he trusts his voice to actually work. Instead he offers his Commander a wordless, emotionless stare, and shakes his head once.

“Right,” the Commander says softly, and shuts his eyes tightly. He inhales a long breath, and when he opens his eyes and exhales, he’s already forcing himself forward through what needs to happen next. “Plot a course for us to get out of here — I don’t want to stick around, not after a mission that bad. I’ll want a mission debrief from her team second — Ursus, isn’t it? — once he’s out of medical.”

Bradford moves to the piloting console without speaking to start plotting in a new course for the Avenger, still not quite sure if he’d be able to speak if he tried. He chooses a route almost by rote, a fairly safe curving trajectory that will avoid major city centers and put them out over rural areas, and is glad that he’s gained enough experience with this that he doesn’t have to think about how to program the directions into the autopilot. He consults the Skyranger’s track, organizes a rendezvous point with Firebrand with terse, text-based coordinates, and gets the Avenger up into the air safely.

Only once everything is settled and autopilot is engaged does he finally speak. “Commander,” he says, grabbing the other man’s attention with a brief wave. “Permission to go off-duty.”

There is something uncomfortably close to pity in the Commander’s eyes when he looks at Bradford. “Granted,” he says, and doesn’t add anything more. 

Bradford nods, and turns away.

He doesn’t remember leaving the bridge, or the walk to his cramped room. He doesn’t recall opening his door or shutting it behind him. He finds himself staring at the plain metal wall at the back of his room, and without further thought, Bradford hauls back and punches the wall as hard as he can.

He doesn’t hit it more than once: his hand aches from the impact, and his knuckles sting with pain before the echo of the assault even fades. He hit hard enough that he knows he’s bruised his hand; he might have even broken something. He doesn’t care.

He shuts his eyes, brings his hand up to the wall again, and finds himself leaning against the cold metal bulkhead just to keep himself upright.

Bradford stays there for longer than he’d like to admit.

He doesn’t cry. Part of him is surprised by that: tears, he thinks, would be perfectly understandable in this kind of situation, even for a seasoned soldier. There’s no shame in shedding tears over the loss of a valued friend and soldier.

But tears seem final, and he can’t process that finality yet. Won’t. 

Kelly is gone. 

If she was lucky, she died an hour ago, before ADVENT soldiers got to her, before they could make her suffer. If her luck failed, she might still be alive even now, being tortured and forced to die slowly somewhere beyond XCOM’s reach.

He wants to hate her for staying behind, for giving the order for her team to leave without her and remaining behind to ensure that at least her soldiers had a clear chance at evacuation. But Bradford can’t bring himself to grow angry with her: he can hate the action even while understanding precisely why she chose to do it. It was the only way to get her team to safety, and he understands exactly why she chose to sacrifice herself for them. A good team leader knows the risks, and Kelly would have seen only one life lost instead of six. Only Kelly, he thinks, and has to stop himself there, because she was a good soldier and a good team leader, but that’s not why he’s mourning her now.

He’ll never kiss her again, he thinks, and until now he never realized that he would find that even more devastating than knowing she’ll never again suit up to lead a team out to the Skyranger. 

There’s a whole host of regrets that swarm up after that thought — so many things he’s now realizing he’s truly done for the last time. After their last undercover mission, of course, he’d told himself that he’d never need to kiss her again, and now Bradford knows just how entirely he’d hoped to prove himself wrong.

He’ll never touch her again. He’ll never hear her breath catch with that little gasp she would give almost involuntarily when his lips brushed the soft skin of her throat. He won’t ever have his hands on her bare skin again, or wake up with her curled beside him in bed, or brush past her in such close quarters that they touch. He’ll never again hear her laugh or see her smile or catch her rolling her eyes; she’s never again going to run her fingers along his shoulders or lean against him companionably when they stand side-by-side. 

But he mourns more than just those past moments as he stands against the wall of his quarters. He shuts his eyes and lets himself admit that he’d hoped for more than what they had already shared under the pretense of their missions. 

He’d wanted to kiss her again, he acknowledges now that he’ll never have that chance. He’d wanted to touch her, to make her laugh, to have her reach for him with the little satisfied smirk that made his stomach tighten in anticipation. He’d wanted her to look at him with honest desire and genuine affection. He’d wanted to know that he’d won her over as himself — as Central, as John Bradford, not as Brian Smith. 

Only with that possibility so categorically denied does Bradford realize just how much he’d hoped for it.

She’s dead and gone, he thinks viciously, and with her gone so many of his half-realized desires are crumbling into impossibilities that it nearly staggers him.

He’ll never have the chance to kiss her while she’s laughing, he thinks. He’s never going to learn how she gained the scar on her left forearm, or why she was willing to leave Vahlen to take a chance on XCOM. He won’t ever know her middle name or her birthday, where she was when the aliens first landed or why she always wears a ballcap into combat. He’ll never be able to back her up against a wall and kiss her until neither of them can breathe; he’ll never carry her to bed. He’s never going to know what it would have felt like to slip inside her, if he’d have pressed her down into the mattress with the weight of his body or if she would have risen above him and ridden him to completion. 

He’ll never know if she’d have even welcomed that idea, he thinks bitterly, and he presses his head against the cold wall. But God, now that she’s gone and he’s realizing all the things he mourns losing with her — her laugh and her skin and how he’d trusted her at his side and how he’d dreamed of their kisses — now that she’s gone, Bradford realizes just how badly and for how long he’s wanted her.

God, he’s wanted her. 

He still wakes reaching for her sometimes. He thinks about her in the deep hours of the night, when his subconscious has freer reign than he’d like. He dreams of her sliding into his lap and kissing him, of her body rocking against his, of her arms twined around his shoulders and her legs locked around his hips. He dreams of his hands in her hair and his lips on her skin. He wakes half-drowned in memories of the taste of her, the sound of her laughter wrapped around his mind like a blanket.

Bradford is fifty-five years old — almost fifty-six. He’s too old and too tired to fight himself any longer, and so he squeezes his eyes shut tighter and presses his forehead against the cold metal wall and finally, finally, allows himself to admit that he might have loved her. Excuses and all the reasons why he’d convinced himself it hadn’t been anything more than friendly regard fall away with the force of his regret. Reasons he’d used to convince himself that it would never amount to anything — the age gap between them, the issue of being her commanding officer, the fear his emotions were simply left over from months of pretending to love her — vanish with the truth of her absence. 

She’s gone, and he’s left behind with nothing but lost possibilities and lonely regrets.

He’s not sure how long he stands with his forehead resting on the wall — long enough that he’s chilled when he pulls away from it, so that his bones creak and remind him again that he’s too old to wallow in grief. 

He lowers himself onto his bed, feeling every bit of his half-century of life weighing him down, and swings his feet up without bothering to take off his boots. There’s nothing to see on his ceiling, but he stares up at it anyways. He could drink, he thinks, but what would be the point? He’s shared enough drinks with her that nearly every type of alcohol will bring memories with it. Besides, he has nothing alcoholic in his quarters: if he wants something to blur his mind into forgetfulness, he’ll have to brave the common bar, which is surely packed with others just as wrecked as he by her loss.

Bradford’s not ready to face anyone else yet. 

He doesn’t really notice when he falls asleep; time doesn’t seem to pass as he stares at the empty ceiling and waits for unconsciousness. He wakes in darkness the next morning, and remembers too quickly why he’s still fully dressed.

It’s a rough day. They’ve lost soldiers before, of course — but not recently, and not anyone as experienced and well-liked as Kelly or Verner, the soldier she hadn’t been fast enough to save. There’s a quiet hush fallen across the Avenger, as though everyone is too afraid to speak loudly or move quickly, and Bradford finds himself resenting the pall stretched over the people he works with. None of them, he thinks harshly, knew her as well as he had: how can they profess to miss her as much?

It’s an unfair complaint, and he has enough honesty to recognize it. She wasn’t his, he thinks with real regret: he had no special claim on her, and she’d made no effort to stake a mark on him after the moments they’d shared undercover. They’d been friends, and if he’d been closer to her than most of the others, well, he’d known her longer and had trusted her more.

Still, he’s bitter that he’s lost her. He’s angry at himself, too, for being too much of a coward to speak to her of all the things he’d half-hoped and dreamed about. He torments himself with guesses, sometimes: would she have welcomed it, if he’d caught her alone some evening in the armory and kissed her there? Would she have accepted his affections if he’d offered them, or would she have laughed and spurned them as nothing more than leftover habits bleeding over from their time undercover?

Bradford’s mind mocks him, as it always has, bringing memories of how her fingers lingered on his chest when he kissed her and taunting him with the hope that she’d have been eager to let him touch her. She’d been the one to suggest they get drunk together as their mission drew to a close, some insidious part of his brain likes to remind him. She’d wanted him then, and had been all too willing to find an excuse to kiss him that had nothing to do with the mission. She’d been half-naked in his lap, writhing against him, her mouth on his and her hands busy exploring his skin, and they’d both known then that it had been completely unnecessary for their cover. 

But then their mission had ended and they’d been thrust back onto the Avenger, and they’d both been too cautious to talk about what they’d done with the excuse of their cover to allow it. He’d been too cowardly to do more than think about how very much he missed her.

Kelly had slid right back into acting professionally towards him after their months undercover. Occasionally, there’d been moments where he had half-convinced himself that she’d been just as conflicted about their return to normalcy as he was: a hand extended towards him and then pulled back, a smile warmer and softer than it might have been otherwise, a sigh not quite stifled enough to go unheard. But he’d never dared act on those little moments, for all he was quick to notice them. She’d always been one of the few on the Avenger willing to treat him casually; who was he to assume that those moments had been anything but the friendship he’d so valued to begin with?

Bradford’s brain latches on to those memories now, though, prodding at them like he might continually test a sore bruise, using them to add fuel to his fantasies. Would she have let him take her hand and pull her to a quiet corner of the Avenger for a kiss? Could he have gotten away with inviting her into his cramped quarters? Would she have smiled at him and come to him like she’d kissed him undercover, all eager hands and greedy mouth? Would she have accepted him as a lover, as rough around the edges and battered and grey as he is?

What had he missed out on because of his reluctance to act? There was no denying that they’d become better friends because of their missions together; besides the Commander, she’d been the only other person in the whole of XCOM who treated him as more than simply XCOM’s Central Officer, and he’d valued that friendship sincerely. Thinking on everything it might have been beyond even what they’d shared as friends makes his chest ache: she’d been so careful to be professional with him, and he’d always wondered what was beneath that formal mask of hers. If he had dared to pursue deepening that friendship, would it have been like it had been on their undercover missions, where she’d felt free to act as his equal? Would she have laughed and tucked her hand into his when they talked, or would she have smiled at him and brushed fingers through his hair if she passed by where he sat in the mess, or would she have rolled her eyes fondly and made some little comment no one else would dare say to him during staff meetings? Would Kelly have grinned at him as they passed in the hallways, laughed with him in the evenings, been a comfort on the long nights spent worrying over reports? 

Would she have called him by his name, if he’d asked her to? She’d always called him Central, as matter-of-fact about his call-sign as if it were truly his name. He’d cherished an ever-changing fantasy about how he could convince her to use his real name. Some nights he dreamed of what he could do to her with his hands and his lips and his body to force her to gasp out his name in a voice weak with pleasure; other nights, his mind imagined how he might react to his name on her lips, and what his response could be to encourage her to continue using it.

He’d dreamed of her, and wanted her, and now all that’s left is to desperately miss her.

But Bradford makes himself swallow down his grief and buried hopes and push forward. XCOM has lost soldiers before, yes, but never before a team leader or a member of the senior staff: there is work to do, and he is the one who must do it. 

So he attends the memorial for Kelly in the common bar, where her team toasts her with tears in their eyes and bandages still covering their wounds. He keeps quiet while the Commander eulogizes her in short heartfelt words, pats Shen’s shoulders awkwardly when the younger woman’s sobs threaten to overwhelm her, and escapes as quickly as he can with a bottle of whiskey he can’t bring himself to drink on his own.

He sits with Sigfried Kleiner, who had been solid and dependable as Kelly’s second but who faces the prospect of taking her place with poorly-concealed unhappiness. He helps drill the rest of the squad in better tactics and practices so that the disaster that claimed Kelly won’t be repeated, and he rather gruffly convinces Kleiner’s wife — a slip of woman with a strong psionic streak — that even if she’d been on the mission as originally planned there was probably nothing she could have done differently to save Kelly.

He pilots the Avenger, and reads reports, and sorts through intelligence from around the world. He works with the Commander to organize and plan missions. He attends meetings each morning with the senior staff, which now includes a very subdued and quiet Kleiner, and plots XCOM’s next missions with quiet efficiency. He does everything he’s done before, and no one can convict him of letting anything slide. If his temper is shorter, if he is a bit more brusque with his subordinates, if even he can admit that he is a little rougher around the edges than he was before — well, no one is willing to call him out on it.

Bradford holds everything together until Tygan approaches him with a mid-size oval box about a week after Kelly’s death. 

“Central,” the scientist addresses him in his deep voice. “If you have a moment.”

“What is it?” Bradford asks, rubbing a hand across his eyes. It’s past dinner by several hours, and he’s coming off shift late; it’s been a long day and a long week, and he hasn’t been sleeping well.

Dr. Tygan holds out the box. “I’m sorry to have to give you this,” he says, “but these were Jane Kelly’s possessions.”

Bradford stares down at the box, the words slowly penetrating through his tired brain. “Yeah?” he asks, rather brusquely, recognizing the shape of it as the general container for a deceased soldier’s effects. “For her next-of-kin?”

Something that is not quite pity crosses Tygan’s face. “Yes,” he says quietly, still holding the box out. “She had you listed for that, Central.”

Sound fades into faint static against Bradford’s ears, and the world greys out to white along the edges of his vision. “What?” he repeats dumbly, not certain he heard correctly.

Tygan presses the box against Bradford’s chest, so that his hands come up automatically to take it. “Her next-of-kin,” he repeats. “I’m sorry it took me so long to gather her things. It seemed poor taste to ask her squad to do it for me, and I didn’t want them to be present while I cleaned out her locker.”

“Good thinking,” Bradford says, still on auto-pilot. His fingers curl around the box. “Thanks, doctor.”

“It’s been said before,” Tygan tells him somberly. “But it bears repeating. She was a remarkable woman, and we are all surely sorry for her loss.”

“Yeah,” Bradford agrees, suddenly desperate to be away from Tygan’s well-meant if awkward consolation. “Thanks.”

What’s in the box almost doesn’t matter, though Bradford dutifully enough opens it to sort through Kelly’s belongings. There’s not much in it. There are a few changes of clothing, a pair of boots, and a grey ballcap with the brim all but creased in half. There’s a tattered novel — amusingly enough by Rachel Nettles in her pro-ADVENT days, likely a relic of some undercover assignment or another — and a woman’s wrist watch. There’s little in the way of truly personal items — no letters from home, no sentimental trinkets, no secrets tucked away. There’s just the general detritus a soldier might leave behind in her locker: pens and socks, shells from her shotgun and the whetstone from the machete she’d used months before, spare hair ties and a mangled pair of gloves.

Bradford sets most of it aside, to be given back out to other XCOM personnel. They don’t have enough of anything to waste throwing out gear she can’t use any longer, and Kelly wouldn’t mind passing it on to others who could make use of it. He tells himself it’s foolish, but he keeps her grey ballcap — it must be a spare, considering she’d worn one on the mission where she’d died, but it’s the one thing out of the whole box that reminds him most of her. 

He finds a very familiar pistol mixed in with the detritus from her locker, and he pulls it from the box with what is almost a smile. It reminds him of something he’d nearly forgotten, and so his eyes go up to the shelf mounted above his bed. He stands to reach up and pull down the knife he keeps stored there. He holds both the knife and the pistol in his hands, weighing them thoughtfully. 

The pistol in his left hand had once been his, for all it has returned to him from Kelly’s belongings: it’s small, holds only three shots, and had never been one of his favorite guns. The knife in his right hand had once been Kelly’s; it’s a basic sheath knife with black para-cord wrapped around the handle. He’d kept her knife, and she’d apparently kept his pistol. They’d traded them — deliberately — during Operation Gatecrasher. She’d needed to go out unarmed to make it through security checkpoints, so he’d taken her knife for safe-keeping. He’d meant to pass it back to her before they’d gone off to rescue the Commander, but in the frantic moments they’d had for preparation, he’d forgotten. Instead, he’d given her his little pistol. He’d always disliked the gun, and had purposely offered it to her when they kitted up to go save the Commander — her hands were smaller and better fitted for the pistol’s grip, and he didn’t like her facing ADVENT without a backup piece. 

He’d kept her knife after that mission, when he realized he’d still had it. He’d told himself it was more out of forgetfulness than deliberate inaction, and then he’d carefully kept not remembering to return it to her. He’d kept it on the little shelf over his bed, a tangible reminder of that mission, of the more than two months he’d spent pretending to love her.

And she’d kept his pistol, he thinks now, wrapping his hand around the too-small grip. Even though she’d voiced her annoyance and dislike of it repeatedly in the run-up to Gatecrasher, she hadn’t returned it to him in all the months they’d been back on the Avenger. 

She’d kept his pistol, and she’d listed him as her next-of-kin, and together, those two pieces of information are enough to finally pierce the rough walls keeping Bradford together. 

He’d meant something to her, he realizes. Perhaps not as much as he wanted — he had been greedy, and had wanted more than he deserved — but she’d valued him enough to list him as her next-of-kin, trusting him to make emergency decisions for her and gifting him with whatever she might leave behind. And for whatever reason, she’d been reluctant to return the weapon he’d loaned her.

It’s hardly an impassioned declaration. There are a dozen logical reasons that could explain either fact. Perhaps it was nothing more than Kelly being practical by assigning next-of-kin status to the man she most often worked with. She simply could have forgotten about the pistol and left it buried in her locker out of negligence rather than sentiment. But it’s hope Bradford hadn’t expected, and with it comes all the little memories of when she looked at him with something he’d hoped had been more than friendship. Everything coalescences into the bittersweet realization that she may have very well welcomed his attentions if he’d been bold enough to offer them.

That knowledge is enough to break him at last, and he grieves in broken, shuddering gasps in the privacy of his cabin, mourning not just Kelly but everything he might have had with her. Bradford breaks open the bottle of whiskey he’d stolen from her memorial service, and drinks more than he should over the course of several hours. He’s wallowing, and he knows damn well he is, but he can’t bring himself to care. He’s allowed one drunken night, he thinks rather viciously, to mourn the death of the one woman he might have loved in his broken, ruined life.

His eyes are red and raw the next morning, and he knows he must look like death warmed over from the way various XCOM team members scurry out of his line of sight on the bridge.

“Rough night?” the Commander asks, raising an eyebrow, when he steps up to his station.

“Aren’t they all?” Bradford mutters, regretting his headache and his binge. 

The Commander’s eyes are sympathetic, but his face is stern. “Usually you have better sense than to do it to yourself.”

Bradford hears the chastisement for what is really is — concern — and grimaces. “It won’t happen again,” he promises, and takes a breath. He locks feelings and regret away, and forces himself once more into the mold he’s built for himself. As Central, he offers his Commander a very small smile. “Ready to get to work?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am posting two chapters instead of one today so no one hates me.
> 
> Also, thank you very much for the kind reviews. It's made my day to know people are enjoying this.


	20. 04-05: Acquiring Hope

# Acquisitions

## Section 4: Winning the Present

### Chapter 5: Acquiring Hope

It’s been two weeks since Kelly died, and he misses Kelly afresh for purely professional reasons every time the Skyranger drops a team down for a mission without her. Kleiner’s led her team out on only two missions since losing her, but both times, Bradford has had to force himself to grit his teeth and refrain from commenting aloud how Kelly would have done better.

It isn’t the first mission where XCOM has attempted to regain an ADVENT captive, but it’s the first time Kleiner’s led such a delicate mission, and Bradford can read uncertainty in every move the large German man makes. There’s hesitation in how he directs his squad forward, in how he takes his time clearing intersections and corners, in how he consults all too frequently with the Commander rather than make decisions on his own. He’s a good man, Bradford thinks, and he has the potential to be a good team leader. But he’s too used to being someone else’s second: he lacks confidence in his ability to lead, and they don’t have the time to help him gain it safely. It makes him overly cautious, and prone to second-guessing himself.

The Commander shakes his head as he watches the last of Kleiner’s squad circle into place behind the blocked convoy. “Finally,” he murmurs, unable to tamp down his frustration with Kleiner’s slow, deliberate press forward. It’s a safe pace — Kleiner is not stupid, and he is going out of his way to not risk his team — but compared to how Kelly drove that same team forward with quick orders and unflinching leadership, Kleiner’s style is agonizingly by-the-books.

Bradford’s lips twitch at the Commander’s frustration, but he says nothing. Instead, he studies the map below them as Kleiner starts preparing his team to crack open the convoy’s armored transport. “Moment of truth,” he offers after a minute, as one of the new rookies on the team throws a grenade, and Kleiner orders his team forward before the smoke has a chance to clear.

“I hope the doctor ducked,” the Commander says on a grimace. “Chang won’t be much use to us if that grenade caught him.”

They’re attempting to rescue Dr. Chang, an ADVENT-captured doctor from one of the Chinese resistance cells with a wealth of knowledge about gene-splicing. Fairly solid intelligence had put him on this prisoner transport, and the Commander had judged it worth the risk to attack it to attempt to free the doctor. The XCOM groundside team swarms forward to open up the large secured trailer, to subdue the troopers guarding it and to free the man they hope is safe inside it.

Still, there’s a long moment of silence as they wait for Kleiner to radio in with a status update — long enough that Bradford shares a concerned and near-exasperated glance with the Commander.

Then the radio comes to life, and Kleiner’s voice is crisp, clipped in a way that is suddenly very German and very direct. “Commander,” he says, “we have two targets for extraction, one mobile, one in need of urgent medical attention.”

“Two?” the Commander repeats in surprise, and then keys his mic. “Understood, Ursus,” he confirms. “We have medical standing by.” And he nods at Tygan, who is standing at his spot at the corner of the bridge. Tygan nods back, and moves to his station to begin relaying his own orders to his own people.

To Bradford’s surprise, Kleiner isn’t done with his report. “We will need immediate extraction,” he continues. As he speaks, Bradford can see via the drone footage that Kleiner’s wife, Maddie, is already setting the beacon out to summon the Skyranger more or less right on top of them. Kleiner keeps talking. “I would recommend a direct route home.”

A direct route home means Firebrand should fly the Skyranger straight to the Avenger: top speed, straight line, no attempts made to divert or distract any pursuers. Bradford presses his lips together: one of their recovered targets must be in dire shape. “That’s risky, Ursus,” he reminds Kleiner over the radio. “They’ve got some ship up trying to hunt us down now.”

“It is required,” Kleiner snaps back, to Bradford’s shock: in the months he’s known Kleiner, never before has the soldier dared contradict him.

He looks over at the Commander, who looks just as surprised. After brief consideration, the Commander nods. “Immediate extraction,” he confirms, “direct route home. It’s in your hands, Ursus; make it worth it.”

There is no official response from the team’s new leader, just a flurry of orders given to his squad in a quick, controlled burst. Baffled, Bradford watches Kleiner step up his leadership dramatically: there’s no hesitation now, no second-guessing. Instead, the man runs his team hard and tight, as confidently as Kelly ever did. They emerge from the ADVENT transport in military order, moving fast and coordinated well. There’s a stocky Asian man with the team, unarmored and unencumbered, being escorted between Maddie Kleiner and Bianchi. Dr. Chang, Bradford guesses, relieved that they’ve successfully found their target.

The second target is not mobile: it’s a woman, slung unconscious over Kleiner’s larger form in a fireman’s carry. She’s wearing a prisoner’s jumpsuit, and it takes Bradford an impossibly long second to recognize her both because her dark hair is for once tumbling loose around her shoulders and because he never expected to see Kelly ever again. His heart lurches, then fires to life in quick, hard bursts. He inhales, sharply, at the same time the Commander says aloud, “That can’t possibly be -”

Bradford turns his back on the viewscreen and looks to Tygan. “Medical team,” he orders the doctor, “the instant the Skyranger lands.”

“Understood,” Tygan says. His eyes are wide, and he’s already moving away from his station on the bridge. “I’ll see to it personally.”

It takes Bradford a moment before he can turn to face the grainy video feed from the team’s drones again. His mind wants to fracture into half-a-dozen thoughts, hopes and fears and worries and sheer disbelief. It takes him time to marshal himself, to remember his job and his duties and his position as Central, and he takes a deep breath to force his mind into order. He shoves all thoughts of Kelly into a small corner of his brain, and instead focuses on her only as a target and a part of the mission. It takes effort to come back to himself, to his job and the mission, but when he does, he moves without comment to stand next to the Commander, to look at the projected scene again, and assess the situation.

Kelly — if it is Kelly — is clearly unconscious. Kleiner is moving swiftly and easily with his burden, continuing to push his team forward with sudden decisiveness and a willingness to take risks that hadn’t been present mere minutes before.

The Commander doesn’t look away from the drone footage. “Have we ever,” he asks quietly as Bradford steps up beside him, “recovered a lost soldier before?”

Bradford considers. “Yes,” he says at last. “Once, about a year before we woke you up. But he wasn’t in good shape, and didn’t survive extraction.” 

They’d tried, he remembers bitterly: he and Kelly and Osei against a well-guarded transport, and it had gone fairly well until an archon had begun firing off missiles. Pedersen had died mere minutes before extraction; Bradford had earned himself a few more scars down the right side of his torso, Kelly had wound up with a concussion and blurred vision for a few frightening days, and Osei had almost lost his left hand. It had hardly been a successful mission.

The Commander nods, and watches Bianchi sprint ahead to clear the evac zone. “What are the risks?”

His mind has already started cataloging potential issues. Bradford takes a deep breath. “Physical condition,” he says without pause. “Interrogation, both what she might have said during it and what they might have done to her to get her to talk. Implants, like yours, to data-mine. Drugs, cognitive damage, the condition she was in when they took her. I don’t know.”

The Commander nods again, and shuts his eyes. “I should have considered,” he begins, and then grimaces. “I had considered, actually. Hoped. But after this long, I’d assumed we’d have heard something if they’d kept her alive.”

Bradford hadn’t even allowed himself to consider it a possibility: he’s too pragmatic, he thinks, watching Kleiner step toward the evacuation zone with his precious and unmoving burden. Too used to things going wrong. Too eager, in her case, to cling to undeserved hope.

“We don’t have a protocol for this,” he admits to the Commander. “And Kelly’s been around practically since the start of things — if they got into her head…”

He falls silent. Kelly had been XCOM’s best undercover operative for over five years, and had been a personal favorite of Vahlen’s for more than a decade before that. She has held a great deal of sensitive information in that time. If the aliens have that knowledge now, Bradford can’t even begin to think what secrets are currently compromised. 

“Still,” the Commander says after a long pause. “If she’s alive…”

He trails off, and Bradford had to shut his eyes to steady himself at the sheer overwhelming relief he feels. “Yeah,” he agrees after a moment, opening his eyes to watch the team start their extraction. “I’ll take it.”

It takes bare minutes for the team to haul themselves aboard the Skyranger — the same Skyranger, Bradford thinks as he watches it gain altitude for a quick extraction, that he and Kelly had stolen away from ADVENT some three or four years earlier. It’s only fitting, he thinks, and stops that thought before he has a chance to continue it. Instead, he busies himself with flight duties and his job as Central: he coordinates with Firebrand, he positions the Avenger best for Kleiner’s demanded direct route, and he stays at his station as the Skyranger hones in and lands while they are somewhere over Russia.

He sets the autopilot with steady hands, trying not to think about how, if she’s still alive and truly aboard the Avenger, Kelly is being rushed from the Skyranger into Tygan’s care in medical. He transfers his station over to his relief officer, and steps down to the bridge with movements born of habit, not actual intent. He crosses to the Commander’s side just as the older man turns away from a monitor covered in updated information. 

“I want a briefing with the team,” the Commander says without preamble. “And I want Tygan’s report, and I want it now.”

“Team meeting in twenty minutes in the armory,” Bradford is able to tell him. “And I’ll swing by medical on my way there.”

“Good,” the Commander says, and turns back to his monitor. “This is either the best mission we’ve done in ages or just a good one. Either way, it’s nice to win for a change.”

Bradford agrees, but finds he can’t speed his steps toward the medical bay. There is so much uncertainty, and Tygan will crystallize it into answers Bradford’s not sure he wants to hear. Instead, his pace toward the medical center is slow and deliberate, and Bradford very carefully does not think about what he might find when he arrives.

He is met at the door by Tygan. “Good,” the doctor says, and takes his arm. “Come with me.”

Bradford allows himself to be directed into Tygan’s box of an office. “So what do we have?” he asks.

Tygan releases his arm, shuts the door, and faces him directly. “Jane Kelly,” he says clearly, and then inclines his head. “Alive, and as stable as I can make her.”

Something loosens around his heart. Bradford crosses his arms. “You’re sure it’s her?” he asks, making certain.

“Without a doubt,” Tygan agrees. He adjusts his glasses as he steps around to stand behind his desk. “Rather worse for the wear. Signs of physical and chemical torture, restraint, potentially starvation, and only the most basic medical care for the injuries she sustained during her last mission. She has not had an easy two weeks, but she is alive.”

“And stable?” Bradford questions, keeping his arms crossed to hold himself steady.

Tygan hesitates. “For now,” he says, and Bradford has the sense that he is choosing his words carefully. “She is currently unconscious, and appears to have been so for some time, according to Dr. Chang’s assessment. I suspect that she has been under a heavy dose of various neurological agents in order to keep her subdued during transport, and preliminary blood tests show that she has a great deal of… I’ll call them conditioning agents… still present in her system. Which brings me,” he adds, “to a decision you need to make regarding her care.”

“Me?” Bradford asks, but before he can continue, he stops himself, realization striking. “I’m listed as her next-of-kin,” he remembers. “You need clearance for something.”

“Yes,” Tygan agrees. His gaze is frank, direct. “I do not know what neurological agents they have been using to keep her unconscious. I have my suspicions, but no way to be sure. I can tell you,” he adds, “that she has not received an implant, and she does not seem to have had any invasive surgeries.”

“And what do you want to do?” Bradford asks.

Tygan takes a breath. “The conditioning agents she has in her system are designed to cause pain. Common procedure,” he explains evenly, “is to allow the agents to naturally dissipate, keeping the patient sedated until the chemical compounds have worked clear of their system.”

“And you disagree with this,” Bradford guesses, uncrossing his arms.

“I do,” Tygan says with a nod. “I believe she is in a fair amount of pain, and that it is worth the risk — which is not insignificant, given we are still unsure what other neurological agents are already present — to attempt to flush the chemical agents out of her system in a more proactive manner.”

Bradford considers for a heartbeat, then nods. “Whatever you think is best, doctor,” he says. “She’d trust you. So do I.”

The words and quick decision clearly surprise Tygan. “I —” he starts, and then he looks down. When he looks up again, his voice is quieter. “Thank you, Central,” he says, sounding subdued. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.” He picks up a small tablet from his desk. “If my calculations are correct, we should be able to flush the chemicals from her system within four to six hours. It will take us at least that long to stabilize her, and to begin work on the reconstruction she’ll certainly need. My best guess is that she won’t regain consciousness for another twenty-four to thirty-six hours. But once we flush the chemicals out of her system, she’ll likely recover — physically, at least — swiftly.”

Mental recovery, Bradford recognizes, is something else entirely, but he leaves that unspoken. “Good,” he says, and because the news is more than he’d hoped for, he finds his exhale is shaky. “Good,” he repeats, at a loss for more to say.

“We are still doing tests,” Tygan tells him. “But you can tell the Commander that it looks as though they were keeping her on a regime of these conditioning agents, and preliminary bloodwork shows no sign of further additives to her system.” His mouth twists unhappily. “Which means that they had not yet progressed to chemicals more likely to induce truth, or to force uncensored speech. I think it likely — not definitely, merely likely,” he stresses, “ that they were preparing her for interrogation, but had not yet begun attempting to extract information from her.”

Conditioning agents, Bradford thinks with disgust and a fair bit of anger. Pretty words for chemicals designed to cause pain and stress to weaken an operative before interrogation could begin. “I’ll let the Commander know,” he says, and turns. “Thank you, doctor.”

“My pleasure,” Tygan says, and as Bradford opens the door, he adds mildly, “She will likely be stable enough to allow for visitors within eight to twelve hours.”

Bradford doesn’t respond to that bit of knowledge. Instead, he leaves medical without attempting to seek her out and see her for himself, and deliberately tries to keep her as a nebulous presence in the back of his mind as he attends the debrief with her old team. He does his best not to think about the blood transfusions and surgeries he’s authorized on her behalf as he works with the Commander on a contingency plan to change the Avenger’s flight path in case they were followed, and he works with Dr. Chang to acquire as many details about ADVENT’s current situation as possible because otherwise he’d be left alone with his thoughts.

It’s well after midnight before Bradford can find nothing more to occupy himself with.

The Avenger is quiet and dark: they turn down the lights as much as possible during the night shifts, to let people have the chance for rest. They’re high enough into the atmosphere that even the Avenger’s engines can’t quite produce enough heat to keep the whole thing warm — pockets of the old supply ship are chilly enough that Bradford pulls on an old sweater and is grateful for its warmth as he finally turns his steps through the quiet ship toward the medical bay on Deck 5.

Kelly’s the only one in medical, which makes for a quiet medbay. The doctor on duty — a thin Japanese woman Bradford doesn’t know well — nods at him from her desk in the center of the room, but doesn’t speak or try to stop him as he crosses the echoing room to come to a halt at Kelly’s bed.

Bradford doesn’t touch her. He stands at her feet, and just looks at her.

She lies quietly, covered in a scratchy red blanket and monitored by a dozen quietly beeping machines. Whatever procedure Tygan had advocated for seems to have worked: she’s peacefully unconscious, and he can see that her breathing is deep and even. Her body isn’t twisted in pain or tense with lingering chemical torture. Bradford’s grateful for that much, as it’s clear to see that she has suffered in her two weeks away from XCOM’s safety.

Angry red welts and the darker crimson of healing wounds are visible at the top of her chest, peeking out from under the loose neck of her hospital gown. Too, there are fresh scars still shining and new scattered across all the skin he can see. Her hands, where they lie carefully positioned at her sides, have blackened and split fingernails. Her arms are thinner than he’s used to seeing, but then she’s a slighter form under her blankets than he’d expected. There are bruises spreading in shades of yellow and purple all across her inner arms, each bruise centered around one of the many needle pricks running along her veins. Her hair is shorter, hacked unevenly above her shoulders, and there’s a mask of dark bruising around her eyes: her nose had been broken, Bradford recognizes from the pattern, though looking at her now, there’s no sign of it in the straight line of her nasal bones. Reset, he guesses, and figures it had been Tygan’s work to set her to as much rights as possible.

There’s an IV line feeding from a tower into her left arm, and though there’s an oxygen mask hooked over the tower, Kelly’s face is free of that obstruction. She’s exactly as Tygan had promised: stable and recovering, and Bradford spares a moment to be intensely grateful for the competent medical team the doctor assembled.

He finds himself breathing in time with her, each slow inhale, exhale. Her pulse is slow and steady according to the beeps of the monitors behind her. Bradford stands at the foot of her bed and simply drinks in the sight of her. She’s battered and bruised and alive, which is more than he’d dare hope for even in his wildest imaginings. He watches her, his eyes and heart hungry for the sight of each breath, every slight twitch of her fingers.

The Japanese doctor doesn’t say a word, for all he stands at Kelly’s bedside for the better part of half an hour. In the end, though, Bradford can’t bring himself to do anything more than look at her. She doesn’t feel real yet, and touching her might make her vanish. It’s a ridiculously fear, but one Bradford can’t overcome, so he doesn’t so much as dare to even take her hand in his. Instead, he watches until he’s satisfied himself that she will keep breathing through the night, and then he orders himself away. He nods briefly at the doctor as he leaves, and goes straight to his cramped room on Deck 6, down the short hallway he shares with Tygan and Shen.

His room is dark when he gets to it, and he doesn’t bother to turn on the lights. He strips for bed quickly, and welcomes the weight of his blankets once he’s changed for sleep and climbed into his narrow bed. 

Only when he lies still and close his eyes does he finally let himself shudder, in relief and grief and dazed hope. He brings stiff hands up to rub at dry eyes, and wonders just what the hell he will do now that his world has been turned upside down again.

This is a second chance he never dreamed he’d have. He knows that. But it doesn’t make figuring out what to do with it any easier.

He isn’t there the next day when Kelly awakens in the medbay. News travels quickly, though, and when word reaches the bridge that the doctors have cleared her for visitors and she’s willing to receive them, the Commander catches his eye. “Want to head down with me?” the Commander asks.

Bradford passes his station off to his relief with a gesture, and falls into step with his oldest friend as they leave the bridge. Tygan had warned them what to expect in the morning meeting, but it’s still a shock to his system to step into the medbay to see Kelly sitting propped up in her bed, all but surrounded by a group of beaming people. Her squad is there, all of them — from Kleiner, standing with his arms wrapped around his beaming petite wife, to the newest rookie, Cunningham, who had done one bare mission with her before she vanished. Shen stands at the head of Kelly’s bed, her hand on the mattress by Kelly’s shoulder and her face nearly split with a relieved grin; Tygan, for all his aloofness, hovers nearby, unwilling to be left too far out of the reunion.

Someone nudges someone else, and the circle around her bed opens for the Commander as he moves forward. Bradford follows just a step behind him.

The room falls silent, happy chatter dying down, and all eyes turn toward the dignified figure of the Commander as he steps to the foot of Kelly’s hospital bed.

“Menace,” he greets formally, with a dip of his head.

“Commander,” Kelly returns, her voice so hoarse it hurts to hear. She’s resting half-reclined in her bed, with a stiffness that indicates she’s still in a fair amount of discomfort. There are bandages just barely visible on her chest, peeking through the collar of her hospital gown, and the plain white cloth only emphasizes the purpling bruises liberally spread across her pale skin.

The Commander reaches forward very gently to lay one thin hand on her foot, the only part of her within reach. “It’s good to have you back,” he says simply, and his powerful voice gentles, warm and approving. “You were missed.”

Her smile is small, pleased and just a little too polite to be whole, and Bradford knows her well enough to see how well she’s hiding the strain behind it. “Thank you, sir,” she manages. Her eyes slip past the Commander, and come to a rest on Bradford. He straightens his spine under her gaze, and doesn’t look away. Her voice is a rasp, but she keeps her eyes on him and says, “Central,” in greeting.

She’s never once said his name, Bradford thinks, and he spends a single second all but bowled over by intense regret of that fact. He’ll change that, he promises himself, and he takes a determined breath. “Kelly,” he returns, using the name he knows her best by rather than her acquired call-sign. There is so much he could say to her that for a moment his mind is simply blank. When he does speak, his voice is low, nearly as rough as hers. “Welcome home.”

Kelly’s smile spreads, turning into something genuine and beautiful. “Yeah,” she says, and his heart eases to see her happy. She settles her head back onto her pillow with something like satisfaction. “It’s good to be home.”

Tygan kicks most of the crowd out after ten minutes. Her squad go without complaint, clearly eager to let her regain her strength. Bradford lingers behind, though, as do the other members of the senior staff. He watches Shen lean forward to whisper something in Kelly’s ear, and almost envies the younger woman for her closeness to Kelly. Kelly nods, and murmurs something back to Shen, and as Tygan steps forward and the Commander shifts a few steps to the side, Bradford realizes that they’re going to have a senior staff meeting here and now.

Kelly gives her report in short sentences, obviously struggling both to recall and explain what happened to her. Tygan hovers at her side, checking monitors and quietly taking her pulse by hand, a kindness that clearly helps keep her grounded. Bradford doesn’t want to listen to what she’s saying, because he doesn’t like picturing her vulnerable and hurt, but he forces himself to think through her statements logically, as though he were merely her commanding officer and not her friend, as though he were not listening to the woman he loves recount her torture and abuse.

In the end, though, the Commander agrees with Tygan’s earlier suppositions. “So no real interrogation,” he says, once Kelly’s fallen silent at the end of her halting report. 

“No,” Kelly says softly. “I was lucky.”

“Lucky,” Bradford repeats darkly despite himself. He’s not sure if he’s scornful or in complete agreement: lucky to be alive, certainly, but luck had little to nothing to with her torture and the agony the aliens forced on her in preparation for whatever they had eventually planned for her.

Kelly looks at him with soft brown eyes. “Lucky enough,” is all she says, but he can hear the quiet reprimand in her voice. He frowns, and looks away from her.

“Either way,” Tygan interrupts, “with time, Major, you should be able to recover fully from this unfortunate experience. You’re responding well to treatment, and with the neurological agents safely removed from your system, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be on the mend again within days, and eventually cleared for a return to duty, if you wish it.”

Bradford’s seen the report the doctors prepared on her, and knows what damage they’d been forced to repair. He’s impressed despite himself at Tygan’s optimism.

But it’s Shen, of all people, who protests. “Return to duty!” the engineer cries out, clearly appalled. “Not after —”

“Lily,” Kelly rasps, and she reaches her bruised hand out to pat at Shen’s fingers where they rest on her bed. She looks up at the Commander when she starts speaking, but her eyes swing between him and Bradford as she talks. “I’ll be on my feet again soon, and when I am, I want my squad back.”

“I’m not surprised,” the Commander says evenly. “But you’re barely twenty hours back from a two-week ordeal. We can talk about this when you’ve had more time for recovery.”

But Kelly has apparently taken Bradford’s words from months ago to heart, because she doesn’t hesitate to argue with her commanding officer. “My opinion won’t change,” she counters hoarsely, fighting to sit straighter as she argues her point. “I’ve spent two weeks hoping to get back in the field. Don’t let this ground me.”

The Commander says nothing about her insubordination. Instead, he stands still and clearly considers. “I don’t want to ground you,” he says after a moment. “You’re too valuable not to use. But at the same time, I don’t want to push you too hard — and I don’t want you making this kind of call when you’re still in a hospital bed.” He nods, decision made. “We can revisit this conversation, Menace, but not until you’re completely cleared for duty again. Then — and only then — if you come back and tell me you want in again, we can talk about reinstating you.” 

Bradford can hear the iron in the Commander’s voice, and so can Kelly. She sinks back into her pillows, unwilling to argue with anything the Commander states that solidly. Bradford finds his voice, and turns to Tygan. “How long until she’s cleared for duty?” he asks.

Tygan shrugs. “At least a week. Two, if things progress slowly.”

It’s faster than he’d feared and more than he’d hoped for.

“Two weeks, then,” the Commander says, with an air of finality. “If you’re cleared for duty and still want back into things, we’ll talk about that in two weeks. Until then, consider yourself off-duty and healing.”

“Why?” Shen bursts out — but it’s directed at Kelly, not at the Commander. “After all of that, you want to go back out again?”

Kelly shuts her eyes for a moment. With her eyes shut, she’s obviously still exhausted and fighting to mask pain, but when she opens them again, her gaze is clear and steady, and Bradford finds himself relaxing because of it: this is the Kelly he remembers, and seeing that confidence beneath her wounds and trauma is the most reassuring sign he could have asked for.

“This is my home,” Kelly tells Shen softly, her voice hoarse and strained. “It’s the first one I’ve had in twenty years. Let me fight for it.”

Bradford is suddenly and intensely proud of her, so strong and fierce that he fears it’s obvious in his face. He looks away as a subdued Shen chokes back worried words for her friend, and is grateful that the Commander takes a decisive step forward. “Two weeks, Menace,” he tells her. “Until then, your only job is to rest up and take care of yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” she rasps, and she offers him a smile where she lies against her medical bed. “I’ll be ready.”

Two weeks, Bradford thinks as the meeting breaks up. He’d stay behind to talk to Kelly, but Shen looks firmly entrenched at her side and he’s not entirely sure what he’d say to her anyway. Instead, he rather awkwardly pats Kelly’s arm where it rests by the side of her bed, and tells her, “It’s good to have you back, Kelly.”

Her laugh is quiet, more a snort of breath than any real laughter. “Yeah,” she agrees. And he’s not quite sure if he imagines the way her eyes spark when she adds, “Central,” as her farewell.

He wants to lean over her and press his lips carefully against her skin to soothe away her pains. He wants to wrap his arms around her and pull her close and dare the aliens to go through him to hurt her. He wants to run his fingers across her face and listen to her breathing hitch as he finds her freckles beneath her bruises. He wants to pull her up out of her hospital bed and kiss her until her hands fist against his shirt and she sighs into his mouth and her body goes loose and pliant against his.

He wants to lay his soul bare before her and beg her to for once call him by his name instead of the call-sign he’s lived as for the past twenty years, to prove that he’s still John Bradford beneath his duty as Central, to acknowledge that he’s still a man beneath his dedication to the cause.

Instead, Bradford simply turns away from her and hauls in a deep breath.

Two weeks, he thinks as he walks away from her. Two weeks until she’s released to duty and cleared to take her squad groundside again: two weeks until he risks losing her all over again.

Two weeks, he decides, to work up the courage to be honest with her.


	21. 05-01: Acquiring Happiness

# Acquisitions

## Section 5: Winning the Future

### Chapter 1: Acquiring Happiness

Kelly spends her first week in medical bay reasonably enough. But the week after, when she’s physically recovered but not yet signed back onto the duty roster, Bradford can see her starting to chafe at the forced break from what she clearly views as her job. 

He’s not surprised that she wants to jump right back into the fight. This has been her life for as long as he’s known her — always preparing to move forward to the next mission, the next assignment. Forced inactivity, even when the medical necessity of it is acknowledged, grates on her nerves. So he watches with amusement but also sympathy as she squirms on the sidelines as Kleiner checks over his team for a mission three days before the Commander is willing to even think of reinstating her for groundside missions.

Technically, she probably isn’t supposed to be in the hangar bay at all, but Bradford’s not going to be the one to call her out for attending. Instead, he makes his way over to Sigfried Kleiner, and stops in front of the German man. “It should be a quick in and out,” he tells the team’s current leader. “We’re not expecting much resistance on this one, but don’t get overconfident.”

“Understood,” Kleiner answers politely. “Thank you, Central.”

It’s a simple enough retrieval mission. The team will drop in, move quickly to mark as many supply crates as possible, and hopefully return for retrieval without attracting any attention from the few ADVENT soldiers guarding the place. It would be the perfect first mission back for Kelly — low-risk and low-stakes — and everyone involved knows it, but it’s three days too early for Kelly to suit up with her team.

Kelly is talking with Maddie Kleiner in low tones, standing beside the shorter woman with her arms crossed and her eyes narrowed. It’s not an argument to Bradford’s eyes, and besides, Maddie’s psionic enough that arguing with her tends to be an exercise in frustration. Kelly is glaring with no small amount of envy at her team as they go through their usual gear checks, and only the still-angry red welts marking her exposed arms explain why she’s not in her armor herself.

Maddie says something quiet back to Kelly, and almost by habit, Kelly steps forward to test the other woman’s gear. Fingers that have mostly lost their bruises tug on the straps criss-crossing Maddie’s back and double-check the psi amp harnessed there, and Maddie quips something in response that has Kelly actually smiling as she claps a hand to Maddie’s shoulder to urge her toward where her husband waits with the rest of the team.

Bradford can’t resist moving to stand at Kelly’s side as Sigfried Kleiner gestures the team into the back of the Skyranger. “Strange to be on this side of that door?” he asks, as the Skyranger’s cargo hatch slowly closes behind them.

Kelly huffs out an annoyed breath, and crosses her arms again, still scowling at the transport as the elevator groans to life beneath them. The elevator jostles them as it starts to rise, but she adjusts her balance to compensate for the jerk as it shudders into motion. “I should be on there with them, and you know it.”

“You were kept prisoner for two weeks,” he counters her, though he recognizes her point. “Be glad the Commander’s only making you take two weeks off to recover.”

“I was unconscious for most of it,” she grumbles without looking at him. “It’s not like I spent the whole time being traumatized.” 

Bradford gives her a very skeptical look as they rise up out of the hangar and onto the outer deck of the Avenger. “You required six hours of surgery and three days of intensive treatments before Tygan cleared you to leave your bed,” he says shortly, not pleased with knowing just how badly she was treated in her time as ADVENT’s captive.

Kelly sighs, and loosens her arms. She brings her hands up to scrub at her face as the Skyranger’s engines fire up, and she sounds frustrated. “All right,” she admits. “I’m not arguing that I was injured, and yeah, I’m not best pleased about the trauma and nightmares I’m sure I’ll be dealing with for a while from all this. But the best way for me to get over this is to get back to work. I want to go groundside again, not hide up here and be useless.”

It takes effort to not reach for her, and Bradford’s honestly not sure if he wants to hold her to offer her comfort or to reassure himself. “Three more days, and you can ask to be reinstated,” he reminds her, and he feels that deadline keenly himself.

“Yeah,” she sighs, and her hands drop to her sides. The elevator grinds to a halt, leaving them standing out in the open air, at the far end of the elevator from where the Skyranger is preparing for liftoff. Kelly looks away from the Skyranger to peer up at him cautiously. “What do you think my odds are?”

“Odds for what?” he asks.

She makes a quick impatient gesture at the Skyranger, now cycling through it’s final liftoff preparations. “Actually being reinstated,” she explains. “Do you think he’ll actually do it?”

He snorts before he can help himself. “Was there ever any doubt?” he asks, uncrossing his arms. “The Commander will try to talk you out of it, to make sure it’s what you really want, and he’ll call in Tygan and have you do every stress test in the books to make sure you’re not putting yourself back into things before you’re ready. But the instant you prove you’re in good shape and still want the job, he’s going to slap a commendation on you and put you right back out in the field. Hell,” he adds, because he knows the Commander’s style and because Kelly’s genuine worry over this seems almost comically unnecessary, “he’ll probably promote you again for it.”

Kelly’s laugh is brief, which doesn’t quite hide her disbelief. “Not the promotion route I’d recommend,” she says, and they stand in silence as the Skyranger’s engines whine up to full power. The transport ship lifts gracefully off from the hangar’s elevator above them, and once she’s in the air, her engines adjust and kick up to flight speed.

He should head to the bridge, to prepare to take his station beside the Commander and monitor the team as they start their mission. But Kelly lingers, watching the Skyranger head toward the horizon, and so Bradford stays beside her. It’s a nice evening: there are clouds high above them in the blue sky, and there’s enough of a breeze that he can smell warm soil and broken grass even from how high they are above the ground on the Avenger’s outer deck.

“Just like the first time we saw her fly,” Kelly murmurs, her eyes tracking the Skyranger. “Do you remember? Standing on that skyscraper at night after we stole her, watching Firebrand take her home for us.”

Bradford follows her gaze out to where the Skyranger is still visible. The metal hull glints in the sun, but he can still make out the shape of the vessel, now a far more familiar sight than it had been all those years ago. “I remember,” he agrees.

She sighs almost soundlessly. “Did you ever think we’d do this well?” Kelly wonders softly, her brown eyes focused on the distant form of the Skyranger where it’s heading for the horizon. “Back then — before we knew about the Commander, before we had the Avenger in the air, before all of this. Did you ever think we’d get this far?”

The personnel elevator off to the side dings, and a trio of technicians emerge from it. Bradford looks at Kelly where she stands beside him. “No,” he admits, keeping his voice low, wondering if they’re still talking about XCOM. “Hoped, maybe. But this is more than I figured we’d ever get.”

She doesn’t turn to face him, but he can see the smile slowly stretch across her face in the early evening sunlight. Her freckles are visible again on her face, no longer overshadowed by bruises, and though there are laugh lines around her eyes and traces of grey in her hair, she stands as loose and confident as she’d been when he first met her five years ago as she watches the Skyranger vanish into the west against the sun. “Yeah,” she says. “I know the feeling.”

He wonders how long it’s been since she’s simply been able to stand outside and enjoy the feeling of having the sun on her face. Because he suspects the answer is measured in weeks, he doesn’t make the offer he’d been contemplating, to see if she wanted to come up to the bridge with him to watch what goes on from the other side of her radio on team missions. Instead, he steps away from her without offering her a farewell, and takes the personnel elevator down by himself. 

He returns to the bridge and steps into his role as Central. He is only slightly surprised to hear, some three hours later, that Kelly had still been outside on the landing pad when her team returned to the Avenger after their mission. She clearly needed the time alone in the open air, he thinks, and wonders if it helped her clear her mind.

It does not come as a shock three days later when Kelly shows up uninvited and unannounced at the senior staff meeting in place of Kleiner. She moves into the room without hesitation, as though she were certain in her welcome there, and comes to stand directly in front of the Commander. “Commander,” she says, requesting his attention.

“Menace,” the Commander says affably. “I suppose you have a question for me.”

Kelly nods her head. “Yes, sir,” she says firmly. “Here.” And she hands him a tablet.

The Commander takes it and touches it, bringing it to life. Numbers scroll across the screen. “What am I looking at?” he asks after a moment.

“Test results,” Kelly tells him serenely. There are nerves behind her eyes, but Bradford doubts any of the others can see them there: he knows her better and watches her more closely than the others. When she speaks, those nerves don’t bleed over into her words, which are calm and professional. “Dr. Tygan’s team has declared me fit for duty, and I’ve passed every physical required for groundside work. I’m as recovered as I’ll ever be, and I’m more useful on the ground with my team than I am anywhere else.” She takes a breath, her anxiety tightly contained. “Commander,” she states, “I want to be reinstated.”

“No,” the Commander answers simply.

There is a moment of absolute silence. Bradford’s not entirely sure Kelly’s still breathing as she stares up at the Commander, her face completely devoid of all expression as a way to mask her shock. Shen and Tygan, both already sitting at the little round table they use for these morning meetings, share an apprehensive glance between themselves and keep quiet.

Bradford, though, knows the Commander well enough to see nothing but satisfaction in his face. He was never worried, truly, but relief spikes through him at the sight, and he relaxes even before the Commander speaks again.

“No,” the Commander repeats gently. But then his smile breaks across his dark face, and he beams down at Kelly. “When you left, you were a major — I’m not reinstating you as a major. I’m making you a colonel.” And he offers Kelly not a salute, but one thin hand held out for a handshake. “Welcome back, Menace. We’ve missed you.”

Kelly, though, glances at Bradford almost in shock, and then up at the Commander. “You mean to tell me,” she says slowly, “I’m getting _promoted_ for being idiot enough to get myself captured?”

“No,” the Commander repeats patiently, and actually reaches out to take her hand, directing her to shake his in acceptance. “You’re being promoted because you were willing to sacrifice yourself to save your team from certain death, and because during your absence, we realized just how good you are at your job when we discovered we were unable to replace you.” He drops her hand, still smiling, and steps closer to her to take her by the shoulders and physically turn her around to point her at the table where Shen and Tygan are already sitting. “Now take a seat, Colonel. Let’s get you up to speed again on what you’ve missed.”

She shakes her head, a quick toss that sends her choppy ponytail swaying as she tries to ground herself, but she moves to take her place at the table as directed. As she steps past him, she looks up at Bradford. “I suppose I should stop being surprised when you’re right,” she tells him cryptically.

Bradford understands her meaning quickly, though, and just smirks. “Told you so,” he taunts mildly, and follows her as she starts the always-awkward slide to find a spot at the table.

“I missed something,” Shen says faintly, looking from Bradford to Kelly.

“Several somethings,” Tygan agrees, following her gaze but sounding amused.

The Commander just laughs. “All right, everyone,” he says, and sits down across from Bradford. “What have we got this morning?”

It’s a longer meeting than usual, if only because there are two weeks of progress and advancements and intelligence for Kelly to catch up on. But she’s a quick learner, and she asks good questions, and in many ways, it’s like she was never gone.

Bradford hesitates, though, before he offers his final bit of information just as the meeting draws to a close. “There’s reports of a new facility being built out in Sector Two,” he reveals, and offers his intelligence up for the group to study. “Local resistance cells haven’t been able to get anywhere near it — there’s ADVENT security, and more than a few aliens guarding the perimeters, including some of the new mutons, and all the reports I’ve gotten make reference to some kind of psionic portal in the middle of it all.” He makes himself finish his report. “It’s drawing a lot of power off the grid, and whatever it is, it just went online a few days ago. Odds are good we’re going to want to take it out, and we should probably do it sooner rather than later.”

Kelly lifts her head sharply, but says nothing. It is the Commander who considers the target carefully, and who eventually makes the decision. “Then we deal with it now,” he says firmly. “How far out are we?”

“Twenty-eight hours of flight time,” Bradford says, because he’d been prepared for that question. “Another two for the Skyranger to get into position.”

The Commander drums his fingers along the table. “Dr. Tygan? Dr. Shen?” he asks, inviting additional information. But both chief scientist and chief engineer shake their heads. The Commander takes a breath, and his fingers still. “Menace?” he offers quietly, looking to her.

Kelly sits straight and proud. “We can be ready by then,” she says, and it’s settled. 

The meeting breaks up shortly afterward. Tygan and the Commander leave together, heading for the science labs, and Shen scurries off to deal with a minor emergency electrical issue in one of the subdecks. Bradford follows Kelly out of the room — she’s moving with purpose, with the rolling gait that defines her stride, and Bradford knows she’s heading for the barracks. Her team won’t be surprised to have her back, he thinks. Hell, Kleiner hadn’t even bothered to show up to the meeting, which means either he or his psionic wife had been so sure of her reinstatement that he’d deliberately removed himself ahead of time, to spare everyone the awkwardness of demoting him back to being merely Kelly’s second, a position he’s likely more comfortable in anyway. But the mission announcement she brings will be new information for them. Kelly will need to assess her team, pick her squad for the assignment, and start organizing them with gear and as much planning as they have time for. She’s clearly eager for the challenge: there’s a spring in her step, something confident and pleased, and he likes seeing her move with such clear purpose.

“Hey,” he says, halting her as they reach the end of the hallway and she turns toward the barracks. He’s standing at the fork in the hallway, poised to head to the bridge to start editing their flight path to swing the Avenger toward Sector Two. She looks back at him, curious but not alarmed, obviously ready to get to work. Before he can talk himself out of it, he finds himself telling her, “Come find me later tonight when you’ve got a chance.”

Kelly gives him an amiable little nod. “Sure thing, Central,” she says, and doesn’t seem to find anything unusual in that request.

Bradford, watching her leave, wonders if she’d be so casual with her agreement if she knew what he wanted to talk about. 

It takes effort to turn off his mind and go through the day without thinking about the conversation he’s promised himself he’ll have with her that night. But Bradford has gotten very good at training his brain to not think about anything but the work he needs to do: it’s a skill he’s developed more out of self-preservation than anything else these past twenty years, and he finds that it serves him in good stead when thoughts of Kelly threaten to distract him. Still, it’s a long day, made longer by a jumble of reports from a poorly-run resistance cell located somewhere in eastern Australia, and he almost doesn’t have time to think too much about the talk he needs to have with Kelly before there’s a knock on the door to his quarters just after dinner.

“You wanted to see me?” Kelly asks when he opens his door.

Bradford considers her for a brief moment. She’s standing in the hallway beyond his small room, arms loose at her side and comfortable in her resting stance. She’s dressed in the basic dark grey pants and shirt most of XCOM’s soldiers wear in their off-duty hours, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her scars are fading where they’re still visible on her skin: they’re faint white lines now, not the angry welts of even three days prior.

She’s at ease, looking at him with no fear or hesitation. He wouldn’t have blamed her for having nerves: he’s still technically her commanding officer, and he did summon her more or less out of the blue. Few soldiers wouldn’t worry to receive such an order.

But she’s more operative than soldier, and she’s worked too closely with him to truly fear him, so there is no trepidation in how she looks up at him when he opens the door. Instead, there’s trust and comradeship and the faintest hint of what might be honest affection.

It’s that last glimmer in her eyes that gives him the final courage needed for him to step off to the side of his doorway. “Come on in,” he invites, knowing it’s a turning point for him.

Kelly has no such knowledge. She gives him a faint smile, and accepts the invitation without second thought. She steps past him into his cramped quarters, and glances around herself curiously but without any sign of discomfort at being alone with him in his space.

“Is this about the mission?” she asks him as he shuts the door behind him.

“More or less,” he agrees, and he turns to face her. She leans back against his desk — there’s not really anywhere else for her to rest beside his bed — and raises a single eyebrow at him.

There’s uncertainty in her voice for the first time when she speaks. “You’re not thinking of grounding me, are you?”

He huffs out a breath. “Thinking of it, sure,” Bradford says, because he can’t deny he’s had the impulse to keep her safe and sound on the Avenger rather than sending her groundside into danger. “But you’ve got a full release back to duty — I can’t ground you.”

“But you’re thinking about it,” she counters with a frown. She crosses her arms. The look she directs at him isn’t quite a glare, but it’s fierce. “It’s my team, and it’s my job. This is my home to defend, my cause, and I need to be back out there doing my job.”

Bradford considers her again, heart tight and fast in his chest, and doesn’t know what to say to explain why he’s called her here to talk to him. Finally, he looks down at his hands. “I don’t have any whiskey,” he says abruptly. 

His words come out of nowhere, and clearly confuse her. “What?” she asks.

He takes a deep breath, and meets her eyes evenly, because he owes her honesty for this. “I didn’t do well when you didn’t come back,” he admits, and that’s clearly not what she was expecting either, because her brow furrows and she stares at him, still confused. “I was — well.” 

This is not going any of the ways he’d vaguely expected. He shakes his head, annoyed. “Do you remember that night the gene therapy clinics got bombed, a few days before Gatecrasher?” he asks instead.

“I — yes,” she says. Because she doesn’t look away from him, he can see the moment she understands what he’s referencing: her eyes darken, and there’s something almost involuntary about the way she swallows. 

That reaction makes him bolder. He takes a step closer to her. “When you didn’t come back from that last mission, all I could think about was the two of us, drinking whiskey together,” he tells her bluntly. His words are rough, and he doesn’t bother trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. “And all I could think when you didn’t come back was that I’d never be able to kiss you again.” 

Her mouth has dropped open, just a little — just enough for her to take a sharp breath. “Oh,” she says, barely audible. She straightens, pushing herself up off his desk, but makes no move to shift herself away from him. Instead, her dark eyes are steady on his face, something somehow hopeful starting to spread through her expression. 

So he takes another step forward, until — thanks to how small his quarters are — they’re standing face to face, close enough to touch if either of them dared to reach out. She uncrosses her arms as she looks up at him, but doesn’t try to shift herself either closer or further away. “I don’t have any excuses,” he tells her, finally honest with her. His voice has rasped lower, and is not as steady as he’d like now that the moment has actually come. “No mission, no cover story, not even any whiskey. And I still want to kiss you.”

“Yes,” Kelly breathes out. She steps forward, lifting her arms as she reaches for him. “Please.”

It’s all the permission he needs. His hands rush forward of their own accord, almost fumbling in his desire to touch her as swiftly as possible, and when he reaches for her she comes to him willingly. He wraps his arms around her waist and kisses her for the first time in far too long. 

He remembers this, he thinks as his lips meet hers, and memory is no substitute for the feel of her body pressed against him and her mouth soft under his. He rejoices in the feel of her mouth beneath his; he kisses her over and over again until he can’t even process anything but her lips and her tongue and how very willing she is to kiss him in return. She’s shorter than he is, and even that slight difference between them seems like too much distance. His hands slide down her body to haul her up higher and tighter against him so that it’s easier for him to bend down to meet her lips. 

Her response is instant and eager, her mouth warm and needy against his. Her hands fist in his shirt to pull him closer and slide across his shoulders with greedy palms. Her arms lock around his shoulders, and her whole body strains against his as she pulls herself up an extra inch to kiss him deeper, angling her head to better open her mouth against his. Bradford grips her hips and tugs her closer, and as she lurches forward against him, his hands slide down to the back of her thighs to hitch her higher. She adapts as perfectly as he could hope for, understanding what he’s trying to do: she gives a slight murmur that sounds approving and lifts her legs up, wrapping them around his hips and letting him lift her completely up off the floor.

He stumbles back one step, then another, unable to truly concentrate on bearing her weight with her mouth hot and demanding on his; on the third step, the back of his leg strikes his bed. It’s less of a sit and more of a controlled fall, but he manages to tumble himself backwards onto his bed without dropping her.

And then it’s like all his deepest fantasies have come to life — the ones he doesn’t let himself think about in the dark lonely hours of the night, the ones he doesn’t want to linger over and remember and yearn for — because Kelly is straddling him where he sits, her arms and legs wrapped around him like vines and her mouth warm and wet on his. Little soft noises spill from her mouth when his lips and fingers work against her skin, and her hips roll against him like a slowly rising tide.

He has to swallow down a groan of sheer disbelief because this is so much what he’s wanted that it almost doesn’t seem real. His hand spasms against her back to press her closer, and his own hips start to rock up against her as she presses herself against him. He bites at her lower lip to hear her breath catch. Her gasp is swallowed up by his mouth and her hips stutter against his and it’s even better than he could have ever dreamed.

His bed is small and narrow, designed to hold a single person. It is definitely not intended to be shared by two people, but neither he nor Kelly seem to care about that limitation. They twist and turn from where they’re sitting together on the edge of it to try to fit them both onto the bed without separating, but the sheer narrowness of the bunk prevents them from managing the feat. They’re forced to actually stand and separate to figure out to fit them both onto the small mattress.

Bradford would mind having to move away from her more if she didn’t follow him a bare step away the whole time, her hands working to tug at his shirt until he simply pulls the thing up and over his head. “Okay?” he asks her, the first word either of them have spoken in what seems like hours as his hands slide up her shirt, pulling the fabric with them.

Her answer hasn’t changed. “Yes,” she says, lips swollen. Her eyes are dark when she stares up at him, and she flattens her hands against his chest, over where his heart pounds at her touch. “Please.”

He tosses her shirt aside, and the rather utilitarian bra she wears follows it. He would help strip her out of even more clothing if he could focus on the idea, but her hands are quite busily working at his belt and they tangle against his own fingers when he tries to help her. They share a single hungry glance, and it turns into a kiss fierce and fast and broken only by the need to finish undressing as quickly as possible. She comes back to his arms as she steps out of her pants and he kicks his aside, and she is the one to tug on him and practically pull him down into his bed with her.

Despite her enthusiasm, Bradford lowers her to the mattress slowly, and braces his arms on either side of her shoulders as he follows her. There are still fresh scars and recently-healed wounds littering her skin, a history of suffering and pain being erased by medical science and time, and he ghosts his hand across the revealed hurts and wishes he could do more to ease them. Kelly stares up at him with nothing but anticipation in her eyes, her hands already moving back to his head to pull him down for more kisses as he leans over her body to oblige her.

Neither of them are entirely whole these days, he thinks as Kelly’s fingers trace the shadow of an old scar on his shoulder. But entwined together on his bed, they fit together perfectly, scars and age and bitterness and loss forgotten against the feel of skin against skin. She grips him with hands sure and eager, and when he pushes into her, he watches her eyes blur with pleasure and emotion. Seeing her bright eyes cloud into bliss and knowing he caused it makes his heart leap in his chest; he bends his head down to cover her lips with his.

He can’t seem to stop kissing her, even as they move together and rock toward completion in unison. Kissing keeps them both quiet, though, which is no small benefit: the Avenger is small, the metal bulkheads thin, and this is something Bradford doesn’t want to have interrupted. So Bradford drinks in her quiet moans and presses home within her, and her arms wrap around his back and her thighs grip tight around his hips, and the whole time he breathes her in and kisses her like she is all he needs in life.

They’re both too needy to last long: he’s not sure which of them breaks first. In the end she throws her head back and gasps beneath him, and he presses his mouth against her pulse where it throbs at her throat and groans low and deep into her skin as his world narrows to just the two of them locked together in his bed.

The aftermath isn’t awkward, as he’d feared it might be when he dared to imagine she’d accept him. Bradford comes down heavily on his side next to her, and rather than pull away, Kelly follows him. Her breathing is still unsteady, but she tucks herself up against his naked body, and rests her forehead against his chest as she struggles to get her breathing back under control. 

He slides one hand down the slender line of her spine, and gathers her close. He’s suddenly aware of how small she is, how fragile, and he wraps his arms around her in some misguided urge to keep her safe from the outside world. There is so much he could say to her — so much to confess, to ask, to hope — but instead, he bends his head down so that his lips brush the top of her head and waits for his heart to stop racing.

Kelly sighs, content in his arms, and wiggles her way closer. His arms tighten around her in response, and she presses a very gentle kiss to his chest where her head rests against him. “So,” she says, and he can hear her smile even if he can’t see it. “You wanted to talk?”

He laughs despite himself, suddenly perfectly satisfied with the world. “Yeah,” he says, and kisses her hair, shutting his eyes to rest his head against her. “We basically skipped that part.”

She laughs with him, and rubs her cheek against his skin and the coarse hair spread across his chest. “It was worth it,” she teases him, and she stretches, body languid and loose where it presses against him in the too-small bed. 

If he were younger, Bradford thinks ruefully, he’d act on the ideas the slide of her body against his gives him. Instead, he simply enjoys the feel of her skin next to his, and opens his eyes. He lifts himself up when she’s done stretching to rest on one arm and look down at her. 

Her hair has comes undone from the ponytail she almost always keeps it tied in. Her eyes are clear; they crinkle at the edges as she gives him a smile. Her dark freckles spread across her cheeks, and he reaches a gentle hand down to touch them, then leans forward to press his mouth against hers to share her smile.

“I told myself,” he says after he kisses her, his fingers soft on her cheek, “that I didn’t really want you, that it was just bleedover from mission stress and too much time spent undercover with you.”

Kelly’s smile shifts, from something soft and satisfied toward amusement. “Did you?” she asks, sounding intrigued. She lifts a hand of her own up to touch his face; her fingers are warm against the scar on his right cheek, and she follows the path it carves across his face tantalizingly slowly. “How’d that work for you?”

He huffs out a breath. “Not too well,” he admits, and ducks his head down to kiss her again. She pulls him down against her as the kiss stretches on and deepens, becomes two kisses, then three and four. “I missed you,” he says quietly against her skin as they eventually pull apart. “You weren’t mine to miss, but I wanted you, and I missed you. And,” he adds, forcing himself to be as honest as he’d promised himself he would be with her, “losing you made me realize how much.”

She looks up at him from where she rests beneath him on his bed, and for the first time, there’s hesitation in her words, something vulnerable in her gaze. “And now that I’m here,” she asks carefully, “do you still want me, or was this enough?”

She’s offering him an out, he realizes. One last chance to blame the attraction between them on nothing but hormones and stress: the chance to turn this into nothing more than heat and lust and relief.

He doesn’t take it. “I still want you,” he tells her, and though it doesn’t come easily to him, he finds this too important to risk. So he lifts blunt fingers to touch her face again. “Please,” he says softly, with more emotion and hope invested into that single word than he’d intended.

Kelly’s eyes shut as his fingers trace along her freckles, and when she opens them again, they are bright with relief and joy. “Good,” she whispers, and she shifts. She burrows against him, burying her face in his skin and snaking her arms around him, and without looking up at him, she admits, “I wanted this, too. More than I should have.”

Bradford almost laughs. How long, he wonders suddenly, have they both wanted each other and buried those thoughts behind their professional personas? The idea of it makes his lips twitch, and he twines his fingers into her hair, cradles the back of her skull with his hands.

“Good,” he says in return, his heart full and light. She looks up at him at that, catching perhaps the amusement in his voice, and he can’t not smile at her. “Good,” he says, and kisses her again.


	22. 05-02: Acquiring Stability

# Acquisitions

## Section 5: Winning the Future

### Chapter 2: Acquiring Stability

Nothing and everything changes.

He’s still Central, and she’s still Menace, and outside the door to his quarters, there’s no sign that they’re anything more than that. They’ve always worked well together, and that remains a constant: Bradford orders her groundside with her team without hesitation, and she reports back afterward with the same precision he’s relied on for years. Kelly is nothing but professional with him, and he offers her that same courtesy in return. 

It’s a small ship, after all, and soldiers gossip as badly as anyone else when there’s a story to share. Neither of them want to deal with explaining themselves to the curious, and so by unspoken agreement, they give no one any chance to find something worth talking about in their behavior. 

It means that Bradford’s not alone with her as often as he might like, and that Kelly sighs reluctantly when she slides from his bed to return to the barracks where her own narrow bunk awaits her. He wants to invite her stay with him — to spend the whole night, not short stolen minutes or hours — but bites back the offer each time it rises up to his lips. He’s not ready to let anyone else know about this, he thinks, and she seems to agree because she’s just as careful as he is to give the rest of XCOM no reason to suspect them.

Some days he’s not sure why they’re being so cautious. XCOM is hardly a strict military organization, and there are a few other couples in various stages of relationships up on the Avenger. The Commander would hardly relieve either of them of duty for improper fraternization, for all Bradford’s technically involved with a subordinate. Part of it is that they’re both too valuable to lose, which the Commander would be practical enough to realize. And part of it, Bradford thinks, is the Commander would be shrewd enough to understand that he and Kelly are mature adults, able to handle a relationship and working together in the same chain of command without blurring the lines too badly. 

There’d be talk, of course; Bradford’s not stupid enough to think that no one would gossip and spread rumors. Mere boredom and mild interest would lead to speculation in the barracks and the mess hall, and Kelly would likely bear the brunt of that kind of invasive curiosity. She’s younger, and less intimidating than he is; she’s deliberately kept herself approachable to her squad, and she interacts more with XCOM’s rank and file. He’d likely be spared the good-natured teasing and the constant curiosity that she’d have to decide how to handle. That’s not to say he’d get a free pass from the commentary sure to erupt — just as a more superior officer, he’d be a bit more immune to hearing it said to his face and a bit more vulnerable to being seen as taking advantage of an underling. There are many reasons why neither of them are over-eager to let the rest of XCOM know the relationship between them has shifted.

Still, sometimes all of that hassle seems a poor justification for keeping their relationship under wraps, especially when he has a visit from Kelly that lasts mere minutes before she has to hurry away before she’s missed. Sometimes, even after they’ve had enough time to talk and touch each other, Bradford watches Kelly slip out of his room to leave him lying alone on his bed and he wonders why they bother trying to keep what they have secret.

Other days, though, Bradford is grateful for their discretion. It’s not that he wants to hide what they have together out of some sense of shame or regret, but he finds that he doesn’t want to share her. There’s something satisfying in knowing that she comes to him privately, not for show: the reverse, he acknowledges wryly, of how they’d shown affection while undercover, when their actions had been calculated for display. Now he finds it gratifying to have her come to him even though no one is watching. It feels honest, and he likes knowing that she thinks he’s worth the effort. He feels a sort of quiet pride that the attraction and affection he sees in her face when she looks up at him isn’t feigned for the benefit of some outside audience.

Bradford never knows when his evenings will be interrupted by her knock on his door. She’s the one who has to find some way of escaping notice to come to him, and so their meetings are always dependent on what else is going on in XCOM. Kelly can only spend so much time away from others in the evenings before someone is bound to notice — she’s a skilled liar from her years undercover, but the Avenger isn’t a big ship, and there are only so many ways to bend the truth before someone will catch her in a falsehood. Bradford feels guilty that she’s forced to carry the risk of discovery on her shoulders simply due to their circumstances, and does his best to show his appreciation of how often she’s able to join him in his room.

Kelly doesn’t come every night, or even every other night. Most of the time she doesn’t stay beyond a few minutes — just long enough for her to step into his room to offer him a quick kiss and a murmured goodnight before she has to duck back out into the hallway to attend to her other duties. She sleeps in the barracks, like the rest of XCOM’s ground troops, and because of that, she’s limited in how long she can spend away before someone notices. 

Some nights there’s only enough time for a brief conversation, for him to hold her close and reassure himself that she’s still there, for her to rest her head against his chest and tease him to make him smile. Other times there are far less words spoken in the bare minutes they share: nothing but frantic hands and fierce kisses and muffled gasps and his body pinning hers against the door. Sometimes there’s nothing more than a single kiss or a brief touch; more often than not the words they share are pragmatic and almost entirely focused on the day’s duties. But sometimes they’re so desperate for each other that they don’t talk at all, only kiss and touch and shudder against each other in what little time they have, so that they separate unsatisfied and yearning for more.

It’s not enough, Bradford thinks two weeks into their relationship, as Kelly sighs and slides her arms around around his shoulders as she prepares to go. It’s not that he only wants her around so that he can kiss her, either, he thinks: he misses how they used to work together when they were undercover, how she’d sit next to him to sort through reports and intelligence with him, how they had time to talk about nothing as they worked side by side.

“I wish —” he starts, and then stops, because there’s too much he still wants and he doesn’t know how to articulate everything he yearns for.

Kelly pushes herself up onto her toes so that she can lift her chin and press a kiss gently against his throat. “I know,” she murmurs, and her smile is at once regretful and understanding. “I’m working on it.”

Bradford doesn’t understand what she means, but he doesn’t need to. He trusts her.

Over the next few weeks, though, little by little, the amount of time Kelly spends with him in his quarters gradually increases. It’s not enough — Bradford’s not entirely sure what would be, but he knows they haven’t reached it yet — but it’s noticeable. By the end of the fortnight, her visits are longer and more frequent: half an hour easily, and growing longer, and almost every night.

He almost doesn’t ask about it, because he’s grateful for as much time as she can risk giving him. But curiosity and concern make him bring it up. “Not that I’m complaining,” Bradford says, watching her pull her hair back into order after he’d run his hands through it a little too thoughtlessly, “but you’re sure you’re all right spending so much time here every night?”

He could get very used to watching Kelly smile at him. “I think so,” she says. “I’m laying the groundwork for it, at least.” She tilts her head, and adds rather cryptically, “I’ll be able to stay longer soon, I think.”

Bradford pieces together what she’s done only when Tygan actually brings it up during one of the morning meetings with the rest of the senior team. “I’ve heard some rumors,” he starts, glancing at Kelly, and Bradford’s heart pounds in something like anticipation that they’ve been caught out. But Tygan only continues, “Rumors that you’re having a hard time sleeping, Kelly. I hope you’d come to me, or one of the medical team, if you’re having any lingering issues from your prior captivity.”

Kelly’s shrug is casual, just the right amount of defensive and accepting: she’s always been an excellent actress. “Some issues,” she admits briefly, as though she doesn’t want to talk about it. “Thank you, Dr. Tygan. Mostly I just find someplace quiet for an hour or two while everyone else settles down for bed, and that seems to be all I need. But,” she adds as Tygan opens his mouth again, “I’ll let you know if that changes.”

Tygan’s lips twist thoughtfully, but he nods. “Let me know if there is anything I can do to help,” he offers again. 

The Commander frowns at her. “Nothing serious, Menace?” he asks.

“No, sir,” she confirms. She gives him a self-deprecating smile. “I just need a little more time to settle now than I did before, and it’s easier for me to do that somewhere quieter than the barracks. There are plenty of places around the Avenger where I can hole up for a few hours to get some peace and quiet while everyone else turns in.” And, with a hint of humor, she admits, “Maybe I’m just getting old.”

The Commander laughs, as Bradford is fairly certain Kelly meant him to, and that night when Kelly knocks on his door, Bradford opens it for her with a smirk. “Need some peace and quiet?” he asks her.

There’s a wicked gleam in her eyes. “If you don’t mind,” she teases back, and he’s all too happy to pull her into his room and shut the door on the rest of the Avenger for a time.

Afterward, though, he traces the scars covering her skin, and more seriously asks, “You’re really doing all right, after all this?” He taps at a particular starburst scar on her abdomen, which he’s fairly sure is the remnant of the plasma shot she took just before ordering her team to safety without her.

Kelly lets out a slow breath. “Most of the time,” she answers honestly. Her smaller hand comes up to touch his, to wiggle beneath his fingers so that he takes her hand in his at the obvious request for comfort. “There are nightmares, sometimes. But there have always been nightmares, so that’s not really new, just… different.”

He has nightmares himself, and suspects that most members of XCOM have histories littered with enough trauma to make sleep a dicey proposition for almost all of them. Because he can sympathize, because his heart still aches to think of Kelly hurting, he lifts their joined hands and presses the back of her hand to his mouth. “How can I help?”

“Hmmm,” she sighs, and she stretches her well-satisfied body out in his bed with a smile. “Can I keep coming by for peace and quiet?”

Bradford laughs despite himself. But he cares for her enough that he repeats his concern ten minutes later, as she’s getting ready to leave. “You’re sure you’re all right with everything?” he asks, aware that it’s a very vague question.

She ties off the last lace on her boots, and looks up at him where he leans against his desk watching her. Something odd flickers across her face, and there’s the briefest hesitation before she speaks. “Yeah,” Kelly says, and she puts her feet back on the ground and stands up where she’d been sitting on the edge of his bed. “Really. You don’t need to worry about me.” She turns the question back on him. “You’re all right with everything?”

“Yeah,” Bradford confirms, and then backtracks. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“What?” she asks.

He gestures at her face, and pushes himself away from his desk to stand straight in front of her. “You paused, and changed what you were going to say when you answered my question,” he tells her, and when she looks surprised, he rolls his eyes. “I’ve watched you work for five years, Kelly; I know your tells. What aren’t you telling me?”

To his complete amazement, she actually flushes. Pink stains the edges of her cheekbones, and she shuts her eyes, clearly embarrassed. “Don’t laugh,” she orders, and she opens her eyes to meet his gaze apprehensively. “I was going to call you Central,” Kelly admits. “And I just realized that is probably not the best option, but I don’t have any idea what I’m supposed to call you now.”

He laughs despite being told not to, and before she can think to be indignant about it, Bradford strides forward to take her face in his hands and kiss her. When he lifts his head, he looks down at her and says, “I know you know my name, even if you’ve never used it.”

Her cheeks are still pink with embarrassment; it makes her freckles stand out more than usual. “Dr. Vahlen said I shouldn’t use it, actually,” Kelly admits. “She said you wanted to be Central, and that I should call you that — and that’s how you introduced yourself, and what everyone else uses with you, so that’s what I did. But,” she adds wryly, “somehow now that I’ve slept with you, I’m not sure I should be using your call-sign as I’m leaving your bed.”

“No,” he murmurs, seeing the humor in the situation. “No, I don’t think so.”

Kelly takes a tight breath. “So,” she says, and looks up at him, her face still framed by his hands. “John Bradford. Do I call you Bradford or John?”

It’s a valid question: most of XCOM runs by military protocol these days, and plenty of people — Kelly included — are known more by their surnames than by their given names. But he’s thought about her calling him by name so often that he doesn’t need to consider his answer. “John,” he says. He might still think of himself as Bradford — almost forty years of military life have led him to define himself by what he’s most often called — but with her, he thinks, with her he wants the reminder that he is still John underneath it all, that he’s still a man allowed to hope and dream and love even if being Bradford and Central have layered duties and responsibilities over him until the man beneath is all but buried.

Kelly smiles at him, and shifts forward on her toes to lift her lips up to his. He bends to kiss her again, and when she slides back down, she keeps her eyes on his. “John,” she whispers, and his chest tightens at finally hearing the sound of his name from her throat. She uses the name deliberately, calling his attention to her to prove that she means what she says. “I’m all right. Really.”

It is more than relief that has him kissing her again, and though she’d meant to be on her way out the door, he doesn’t let her pull away from him for several more minutes. She doesn’t seem upset by being detained, though; in the end, she pulls away from him with a laugh.

“I should get going,” Kelly tells him apologetically, and he can see the regret in her eyes. “But soon enough no one ought to notice if I’m gone for a few hours or so, and then I can stay longer.”

She always was their best undercover operative, Bradford recognizes, and he’s amused at the thought that she’s putting her talent to use to gain more time with him. “Good,” he says, and he brushes her hair back from her face. “This isn’t enough.”

“No,” she agrees, “it’s not.” Then her smile shifts, turns satisfied. “Good night, John.”

“Good night,” he returns almost automatically, still pleased hearing her say his name, but then a thought occurs to him and he pauses. He follows her to the door, and as she reaches for the latch, he says, “I’ve always called you Kelly.”

She looks back at him before she opens the door. “Yeah,” she says, still smiling. “I’ve always liked that.” She hesitates, then pauses with her hand still on the door’s latch to look at him with serious eyes and a dimming smile. “It’s silly,” she tells him, “but who I was when I was just called Jane died a long time ago. I like being Kelly better, and I’d like you to keep calling me that.”

It’s a part of her history he hadn’t known, and he’s honored she’s trusting him with it. He doesn’t make light of her request, but because it’s a hell of a downer to an otherwise stellar visit, he gently touches her cheek. “I can do that,” he agrees. “I like Kelly. It’s how I’ve always thought of you.”

He can see gratitude in her eyes. “Thank you,” she murmurs, and looks down as she struggles to maintain her composure. She takes a breath, then looks up, and there’s a sudden, impish flash of mischief across her face as she turns away from him to open his door. “I didn’t always think of you as Central, you know,” Kelly tells him in a low voice. Her eyes slant upward to meet his, dark and full of promise. “Especially after you first kissed me.”

She steps away from him and moves down the hallway before he can find a reply to that particular bit of information, which stings through Bradford with such direct impact that he rocks back on his heels and takes a solid thirty seconds before he remembers he should shut the door behind her.

He makes her come back to that statement two nights later when she visits him again, when he grants his fantasies free reign over her and does his best to see how many times he can make her gasp out his name before she’s incapable of speech. She laughs afterward, breathless and amazed, and he laughs with her and wonders how he lived without her.

Still, little changes outside the plain grey metal walls of his quarters. He’s Central, and she’s Menace, and they work together in perfect charity with professional courtesy and perhaps the barest hint of more, a holdover from their undercover days that everyone has grown so used to seeing that it’s not really questioned. It means that Kelly’s always been able to get away with just slightly more with him than everyone else. It’s something that alternatively baffles and impresses the other members of XCOM, especially the newer ones who don’t entirely realize how much history working together the two of them share, but it’s accepted by the rest of the Avenger as just one of the quirks of the senior staff.

Bradford doesn’t think anything about their casual partnership or about much Kelly’s always dared to treat him as an equal until Kelly glances at him at the end of one of their morning senior staff meetings. “Central, I just remembered,” she says, just a touch too casually for that to be true. “Does the name Conrad Ecker mean anything to you?”

Shen chokes on her coffee. She gasps for air and turns an interesting shade of red, her eyes watering as she coughs, and the Commander, sitting next to her, is forced to slap at her back a few times with his thin hands. “Sorry,” she gasps out after a moment, waving a hand in front of her face. “Sorry, just — sorry.”

Suspiciously, Bradford glances at Kelly. “No,” he says after a moment’s consideration. “Should I know him?”

Shen wheezes for breath; Kelly’s smile is just a shade too innocent to be real. “No, no,” she says, and slides around the table to the end of the couch. “Just checking.”

He glares at her, sure there’s something going on he doesn’t know about, and debates letting it lie. He shares a puzzled glance with the Commander, who looks as lost as he is, and then looks at the still-red Shen and the definitely amused Tygan. “Am I missing something?” he wonders aloud.

“Apparently not,” Tygan murmurs, and scoots gracefully to the edge of the table after Kelly. “I’ll take my leave now, if I may. I’ll report back to you on my findings as soon as they’re ready.”

“Thank you, doctor,” the Commander says, and eyes Kelly thoughtfully. “Anything else?” he asks her.

“No, sir,” she says, and gives him a brief and polite smile that does nothing to conceal her amusement. “I’ll get down to the armory.”

“Wait for me,” Shen blurts, and she hurries around the table, her coffee forgotten, to rush to Kelly’s side. The two women leave the room together, and as soon as they’re past the door’s threshold, Bradford hears Shen insist, “You can’t just _ask_ him —” and Kelly’s laughter in response.

“So,” the Commander says slowly, sounding as confused as Bradford feels. “Is that code for something, or…?”

Bradford just sighs. “Hell if I know,” he says, and shakes his head. “It’s probably some joke between Shen and Kelly. Don’t ask me what the the two of them get up to in their spare time. I don’t want to know.”

The Commander cranes his neck to peer down the hallway after the two female members of his senior staff. “I thought they were decent friends,” he muses, and sounds satisfied to have his suspicions confirmed. “When did that start?”

Bradford rubs his hand along the back of his neck, trying to recall. When he does, he winces. “About five years ago,” he remembers. “They took off together for six or seven days, and when they came back, Shen had a tattoo and Kelly needed twelve stitches and I decided then I didn’t ever want to know any of the details.”

The Commander snorts out a laugh before he can help himself. “That’s even better than I imagined,” he snickers, and laughs again. “I wondered where she got her tattoo. How did she find someone willing to give her the XCOM sigil?”

Bradford can see the humor in it himself, and allows himself to smile. “Like I said,” he repeats, “I don’t want to know.”

Still, later that night, when Kelly is leaning companionably against him where she sits in his bed, he decides to risk asking for an explanation. “So,” he asks, setting his tablet and the reports on it down to look at her. “Who’s Conrad Ecker?”

Kelly’s laugh is delighted, and instead of answering, she lifts up her tablet. She taps away on it for a moment, and then clears her throat. “Conrad Ecker,” she reads deliberately, “had probably once been a fairly handsome man, years ago before he'd had to worry about ADVENT and aliens. Now he was older, his short hair more grey than brown, and he had an impressive scowl that seemed to be a permanent fixture on his heavily scarred face. He still had the broad shoulders of a soldier and the stubborn mentality of a career military man, but twenty years of slowly losing a war were clearly taking a toll on him.”

Bradford stares at her, completely perplexed. “What the hell?” he asks, not entirely sure if he is insulted or just completely baffled. Kelly’s peals of laughter are so loud that he worries that they’ll carry through the walls. Shen and Tygan are the only other two people with quarters nearby, and he definitely doesn’t want either of them knocking on his door at this hour; he gives Kelly a glare that is definitely not a scowl, and waits for her to regain her composure.

Kelly, grinning fit to burst, tosses the tablet onto the bed beside her. “Rachel Nettles,” she tells him. “She did warn us she based a book on us.”

It takes a minute for the pieces to come together. “You have got to be kidding me,” he groans, leaning back against the wall.

“Sorry,” Kelly apologizes cheerfully, sounding anything but contrite. “But enough people are talking about it that I wanted to shut down some rumors. Shen, at least, will spread that story around — you did your part perfectly, by the way.”

“Explain,” Bradford demands.

Her smile twists. “Conrad Ecker,” Kelly says, “is close enough to you that he’s pretty obviously based off of you, or someone remarkably like you. Which raises a lot of questions, really, about the author, but even more about you — if you know the author, or if you’re aware that there’s a fictional version of yourself out there, stuff like that. A lot of gossip and speculation, and that’s always dangerous.” She shrugs, and her shoulders shift against his side. “It’s a series, now, actually, which is why the old rumors are starting back up — she just put out a second book, uploading it out through some of the illegal share-file sites, and they’re apparently pretty popular since it ends on a cliffhanger and she’s working on the third book. Anyway, there was a lot of speculation going around about if Ecker was really based off of you or not, and I figured I’d shut it down by asking you about it directly.”

“Speculation?” he repeats incredulously. “That what, I’ve got some fictional alter-ego?”

Kelly laughs. “If Ecker was really based off of you,” she points out, “the author would have access to a lot of confidential XCOM information. And a lot of what Ecker does might therefore be based off of actual events, which therefore might be events you were involved with. Sort of some circular logic involved, but before I have to explain to my entire squad that no, Central did not actually get into a fistfight with the Speaker, I thought I’d take a gamble that you hadn’t read the series and would have no idea who Ecker was.”

He feels old. “Ecker got into a fistfight with the Speaker, and people are taking the books seriously enough to think they’re based on me?” he asks in disbelief.

She laughs again, and moves to straddle him, her arms sliding across his shoulders and her thighs coming to rest outside his. “Seriously enough,” Kelly agrees, and she sounds amused. “But with you having no idea who Ecker is, that ought to shut down the more vocal proponents of the theory that the books are your secret life history.”

“She wrote a damn series?” Bradford grumbles, unwilling to be distracted completely by how Kelly is now sitting in his lap. Still, his hands come up to her hips, and he shifts her to better position her against him.

Kelly is rueful. “She did warn us,” she reminds him. “I still comm her sometimes, actually, and she sent me the books so I didn’t have to go hunting them down. I’ve read them; they’re not bad. Overblown and ridiculous as anything, obviously,” she adds, and arches her back when he can’t resist leaning forward to kiss her throat. “But not bad.”

“She said she put both of us into the books,” Bradford remembers, his mouth against the soft skin of her neck. He’s tempted to suck a mark into her skin, and resists enough to just kiss where he can see her pulse fluttering instead. “If I’m this Ecker, who are you?”

She laughs, and presses closer. “Alice Greely,” Kelly answers promptly, and her hands slide up through his short hair to hold his head. “Except they got married at the end of the first book, so Alice Ecker. And so far, thankfully, no one’s dared come up to me and ask me if I know who Alice Ecker is, because she’s not quite as obviously me as Conrad Ecker is you.” Her grin is all sorts of wicked. “They spend the whole first book working together to hijack a military transport and rescue a former XCOM agent. Sound familiar?”

“Smartass,” he mutters, but he kisses her anyway. “And let me guess. Shen read the books, and figured Ecker was based off of me, and brought it up with you.”

“Mmhm,” she hums against his cheek, where she presses a light kiss. “The book’s inaccurate enough that it’s pretty obviously fiction, of course, so Shen’s current theory — which, mind you, a lot of the crew seem to share — is that whoever wrote it has access to your old XCOM personnel files but not actually any real connection to you. Which, since you didn’t know the name Conrad Ecker when I asked you about it in front of her, will now be confirmed, and hopefully the rest of XCOM will stop speculating about how real the books are or not, and just figure that someone stole your name and general history to create some fictional character with.”

He shakes his head, and starts to slide his hands up underneath her shirt. “So what I’m hearing,” he says, “is you used the fact that I don’t read bad romance novels to your advantage.”

“Hopefully,” she admits, and twitches as his hands stroke across her bare stomach. “And they’re not that bad, all things considered, but there’s been a lot of gossip, and some of it was starting to get ridiculous. I didn’t want you to have to deal with it.”

He reaches higher. “Thanks for sparing me that,” Bradford acknowledges, and as ridiculous as it is, he likes knowing that she went out of her way to keep this potential embarrassment from touching him.

“No problem,” Kelly murmurs, and leans forward as his hands settle onto her warm skin. “But I can think of better ways to use you now.”

“Can you?” he rasps, and kisses her.

Soon she’s coming to him every night, and staying for more than an hour or two each time. It doesn’t always work out perfectly — their off-duty hours don’t always align, and sometimes one or the other or both of them are kept by other duties that prevent them from seeing each other after hours. But they settle into a pattern, and more often than not, at some point in the evening as the rest of the Avenger winds down into the night shift, Kelly will tap a request for entry at his door, and Bradford will stand from his desk to let her in.

It’s freeing to feel like he has enough time to savor the small things. Their time together doesn’t seem so frantic anymore: he still wants her, of course, and he still looks forward to her kisses and her touch, but it no longer feels quite so desperate, as though he’s afraid he can’t get enough of her before she’s gone. Now there’s time to simply settle down beside her and relax, to talk through things and wonder about work and personal matters alike. It’s intensely soothing to know that she’ll come back again, and that the end of the night doesn’t mean the end of their time together.

Some nights still feel urgent. Sometimes they’ll be in the middle of a talk about something else entirely and he’ll catch a glint in her eye and discover she’s pulling him down into his too-small bed with little other warning. Sometimes she’ll barely be in the door before he has his hands on her. On one memorable occasion they don’t even make it to the bed — he takes her up against the wall, pressing her into the cold metal bulkhead with her legs around his waist, able to carry her weight until they both slide to the ground afterward from the intensity of it all.

But most nights are quieter, and for all he wants her sometimes so much it’s hard for him to breathe, most nights don’t see them wrapped together in his bed. Usually when Kelly joins him in his room, they simply spend time together: kissing, yes, as he seems incapable of not kissing her when she smiles up at him, but also talking and questioning and working and even simply relaxing, learning each other in ways they’ve never had the time for before.

The first time she falls asleep in his bed, Bradford very nearly doesn’t wake her. 

He’d been sitting at his desk, running the numbers on a potential mission in Sector Eight, and she’d been skimming through something on her tablet as she sprawled out on the bed. They’d been trading off quiet comments for the better part of an hour, so it takes him almost twenty minutes to notice she’s stopped talking.

He turns in his chair and discovers that she’s fallen asleep alone in his narrow bunk, her tablet dim against slack fingers, her eyelashes still against pale cheeks, her breathing deep and even. Something warm and tight spreads through his chest at the sight of her. It’s been months, he realizes rather unsteadily, since he’s seen her sleep: since their last night in the city, since the night before XCOM came back to life.

He shouldn’t find it such an emotional thing, he berates himself, even as he rises out of his chair and takes the three steps required to come to the edge of his bed. He shouldn’t be so touched to realize that she trusts him enough to sleep in his presence. He snorts quietly before he can help himself: he shouldn’t be so quick to think it’s trust, either. He very gently touches the pads of his blunt fingertips to her face, where there are bruises attesting to lack of sleep beneath her eyes. They’re all tired these days, and most of them aren’t sleeping much; he shouldn’t be surprised to find her exhausted enough to drift off in the middle of a lazy conversation. Her skin is soft and warm beneath his fingers; she doesn’t flinch at the touch, and he slides his hand across her cheek, as softly as he can, and lets his fingers run through her hair to the elastic band she uses to keep it pulled back off her face.

He wants to let her sleep. She’s two days back from a mission that had gone all sorts of wrong, and a single day out from another mission that promises to be just as awful. Kelly could use the break. More honestly, Bradford admits, still gently stroking her hair, he wants to keep her here, tucked into his bed where he knows she’s safe and resting. His bunk is small, but he could manage to fit himself beside her, to curl his body around her smaller form and hold her until he too fell asleep. They’d wake together in the morning, he thinks rather wistfully, hands still against the silk of her hair, and the hell with whatever rumors erupt in the aftermath when someone notices she didn’t spend the night in her own bunk.

Bradford debates it for longer than he should, and then he sighs, and moves his hand to her shoulder. It’s not a decision he’s willing to make for her. “Kelly,” he says quietly, and gives her a little shake.

She wakes quickly, alert almost instantly, and her eyes meet his and she smiles almost before she’s awake. “I fell asleep,” she realizes, and she leaves her tablet untouched on her lap to reach up and grip the front of his shirt.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and because she tilts her chin in invitation, he leans forward to kiss her. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no, my fault,” Kelly says, brushing aside his apology for waking her. He helps her sit up, and she collects her tablet and offers him a faint smirk. “You don’t invite me over so I can sleep.”

“Sure I do,” Bradford disagrees instantly, and gestures at the bed. “You need sleep, you come here.”

Kelly sighs when she stands, and he stands with her. “You’re good to me,” she murmurs, and moves to hug him. It’s no longer awkward or unfamiliar to have her in his arms; instead it’s comfortable, and as right as anything is in this broken new world of ADVENT and aliens. “Thank you.”

“One of these nights,” he tells her, before he can censor himself, “you should stay.”

She stills where she sways against him, and then loosens her hold on him. “One of these nights,” Kelly acknowledges quietly, meeting his eyes, “I will.” But she steps away from him all the same, and leaves him in his room alone, to try to find his own rest in a bed that is still warm from the heat of her body.

It’s three more weeks before she stays the night, and even then, he’s wakened well before his already-early alarm when she slides over him to dress and leave. “Sorry,” she whispers, and kisses him in the dark before she slips out into the empty hallways to make her way back to her own bunk before the rest of the barracks wake for the day.

Bradford understands why she leaves early, even if he dislikes it. His room is at least private — the benefit of rank and seniority. Kelly, for all she’s the highest ranking ground operative and a member of the senior staff in her own right, still bunks with the rest of the combat troops in the communal barracks. He at least has a door on his quarters, as cramped and basic as they are; Kelly has a shared room and only a curtain tacked to the edge of her bunk for privacy. If she doesn’t emerge from behind that curtain in the morning, someone will start asking questions, and the answers aren’t ones either of them are willing to share yet.

Yet, he thinks, and wonders if either of them would really mind the rest of the Avenger learning the truth.


	23. 05-03: Acquiring Home

# Acquisitions

## Section 5: Winning the Future

### Chapter 3: Acquiring Home

They’ve been lovers almost four months before Bradford wakes before she does.

It’s still a rare thing for Kelly to spend the whole night in his room — she’s dared risk it less than a dozen times, all told. But she’d gone groundside with her team the day before, a ten-hour slog of a mission that ended as well as they could have hoped, and she’d come to his room still quivering with adrenaline from her hard-won success on the ground. He’d been more than willing to help her work that energy out of her system, and afterward, when she’d lain exhausted on her minuscule half of his bed, he’d simply wrapped her up in his arms and waited for her to calm.

She’d fallen asleep quickly, crashing hard when she finally had the chance to relax, and he’d been all too willing to slumber alongside her. Now his alarm pings him awake, and she sighs at the noise and does her best to bury her face in his shoulder to avoid it.

Bradford wants to laugh, because it’s the most juvenile behavior he’s seen from her in ages. Instead, he takes pity on her. “I’ve got graveyard shift today,” he reminds her, and glances at the time. “You’ve got another four or five hours before you need to be up.”

“Good,” she mumbles into his shoulder, and she blows out a breath, presses a kiss to his skin, and then burrows herself further into the blankets. “Go be Central. I want to sleep.”

He does chuckle after all, because he can’t help himself, and he rolls away from her reluctantly because staying curled up around her in bed is a far more enticing proposition than heading up to the bridge and his duty station for a midnight shift. But he perseveres, and as a concession to Kelly, he dresses in the dark, pulling clean clothes from his shelves by feel and lacing his boots without bothering to turn on the light.

She rewards him with a warm and very enticing kiss when he leans over her to bid her farewell. “You’re not making it easy to leave,” he warns her as she settles back down into his bed.

Kelly offers him a sleepy and satisfied smile as she shuts her eyes. “That was the point,” she murmurs, already half asleep again. “It’s cold without you.”

She is wearing very little beneath the blankets, and that knowledge isn’t at all helpful in encouraging him to go up to the bridge to run maintenance tests while the rest of the Avenger is off-duty. “Go to sleep,” he orders her softly, and pulls the blanket higher up over her bare shoulders. Because he wants to say more to her — truths he shouldn’t tell her when she’s half-asleep and he’s on his way out the door — he instead leaves her behind and shuts his door behind him quietly when he steps out into the corridor.

It shouldn’t make him so content to know she’s still sleeping in his room and in his bed, even though he’s no longer there to share it with her. But there’s no denying it makes him pleased, enough so that the Commander eyes him grumpily about an hour later.

“You’re in an awfully good mood for graveyard shift maintenance duty,” he mutters, rubbing at his eyes where he stands across from Bradford on the bridge.

Bradford offers him an honest enough explanation. “Yesterday was a good day.”

“It was, at that,” the Commander agrees. He glances at Shen, who’s buried halfway into one of the walls working on the second of six maintenance diagnostics she’d wanted to run in the early hours before the Avenger switched over into a more active mode. “I could take a couple more missions that run that well, that whole mess with the portal notwithstanding.”

Shen makes it through all six of her tests before five in the morning as planned, which clearly pleases her. The Commander is all but unnecessary for most of them, but Bradford grudgingly concedes that having both him and his best relief pilot on the bridge for some of the autopilot tests had been a good idea, no matter how enticing the thought of being back in his bed is. Still, Shen hands her preliminary notes to the Commander with a smile and thanks for being willing to be awake so early for the tests.

“It’ll be a good six months before I’ll need to run most of those again,” she assures them all as the Commander glances through her report on the still-quiet bridge. “The Avenger is in great shape — I can keep her flying for a long time.”

Her words are poorly timed, because barely three minutes later as they’re starting to debate an early breakfast together once day shift comes online, the whole ship jolts hard and alarms start pinging across the bridge. There’s a worrying thunk from somewhere below decks, and then a terrifying moment of absolute silence as displays and engines alike cut out.

They hang in the air for a heartbeat, and then the Avenger begins to plummet. The next fifteen seconds are a whirlwind of chaos and frantic orders, and to give Shen credit, she skids across the bridge’s deck to bring emergency power online without a thought for her own safety.

The engines stutter to stunted life, and Bradford can hear them whine as they overload trying to slow the Avenger’s fall from the sky. The man he’s been training up as the Avenger’s pilot, Singh, has his foot hooked around a railing to keep himself in place at the navigation console, and he’s hauling back on the controls with arms shaking and muscles straining. Bradford feels the metal bridge buckle and shift underneath him, and only hopes it’ll be enough.

It takes effort to make his way across the bridge to grab for the ship’s loud-hailer. Sparks pop at him as he grabs it, and he toggles it on and doesn’t risk overloading the already-struggling systems for any longer than necessary. “All hands, brace for impact,” he shouts, and hears his own voice echo through the ship.

The engines scream with strain, and Shen bites back a curse as she grabs onto a railing and crouches beside it. Bradford takes cover too — surely, he thinks, surely they’re about to hit the ground — and has just a bare moment to wonder about Kelly, probably all but thrown out of his bed with the Avenger’s constant pitching.

There is a stomach-dropping jolt as the engines pause for a reboot, and then an equally painful recoiling jerk as all four of the Avenger’s engines roar back to full power and finally manage to lift the ship aloft once more.

But the flight doesn’t last long. Singh, his hands white-knuckled around the Avenger’s controls, shouts out a sharp warning, and Bradford hears the grind of the Avenger’s landing gear start to deploy. It’s a fast, hard landing, just barely controlled; the whole ship bounces twice, sparks erupt from every console, and there’s the nails-on-chalkboard shriek of twisting metal from somewhere deep beneath the decks. Everyone on the bridge is tossed hard to the floor with the impact.

There is a stunned moment of silence, and then Singh blows out a breath and mutters something that might be a prayer under his breath.

Bradford reaches up for the railing next to him, and hauls himself up to his feet after a brief moment to orient himself. He’s bruised and battered but still intact, and so he takes a deep breath and refocuses. “Someone get me a damage report,” Bradford orders, raising his voice in a call to action as everyone around him seems to be too stunned to move. His words have the needed effect — people start coming to their feet, and a dazed-looking man lurches up toward an ops station.

The Commander is sprawled across the floor, and takes a worryingly long moment to right himself. “I’m all right,” he manages, though he accepts Bradford’s hand to help haul him up to his feet. He’s lighter than Bradford expected; he puts more effort into pulling him up than is needed and almost topples the older man in the process. The Commander’s right arm hangs at an awkward angle, but he pushes Bradford aside when he tries to check it over and instead steps toward the status monitor. “Shen? What do we have?”

“A problem,” the chief engineer says grimly, and there’s a pulse of something deep and vibrating that shakes the whole ship. She’s working frantically to bring up the Avenger’s systems, and just as the thrumming pulse repeats, she manages to bring the display back online. It fuzzes out to nothing with the bone-shaking pulse, the light vibrating into a vivid spectrum of color before the pulse passes and the display sharpens into images. 

“Just one?” Bradford asks in disbelief. 

“They dropped a spike of some sort,” Shen explains, highlighting it on the display. “These pulses?” And a third vibration echoes through the oddly-silent Avenger, like the heartbeat of some enormous beast. “They’re the same thing that dropped us out of the sky, and the spike’s what’s causing them. Electromagnetic, maybe, I don’t know yet. Whatever they are, we’re grounded until we get that spike turned off and I can manage a hard reset of our systems.”

“Commander?” a young woman calls out from her station on the other side of the map. There’s a slow trickle of blood down one side of her face. “I’m seeing reports of ADVENT movement all around us, sir. Reinforcements are on their way.”

“How many?” the Commander asks, and at the question, the woman blanches, losing her professional calm with the next pulse.

“Um,” she says, and looks down at her vibrating display. “All of them, I think.”

Bradford shakes his head, and looks to their engineer. “Shen?” he asks, relying on her knowledge.

She just shakes her head, still watching the display, and another pulse shakes through the ship. “I can’t get us out of here while that thing’s still active,” she repeats. “And I can’t override it from here. They want the ship, Central. They want the Avenger.”

“Well, they can’t have her,” he decides grimly, staring at the map, his mind already racing ahead to options. “We need a ground team and a defensive team, and I want those pulses stopped now, which means getting rid of that spike the old-fashioned way.”

Shen looks relieved he has a plan. “Does the old-fashioned way involve bullets?” she asks hopefully.

“Or grenades,” he agrees, still studying the map of the area around them. “I’m not picky.” He looks down at the console in front of her. “You can handle the engineering side of things?”

Shen nods, sure and confident. “I’m on it,” she says, and her console lights up as her fingers go to work on the keyboard.

The Commander steps to Bradford’s side, and hands him a radio with his left hand. “Reinforcements are on their way, so we’re on a deadline,” he warns. Bradford affixes his radio into the shell of his ear just as the Commander makes his first announcement. With his voice suddenly calm and authoritative, he says crispy, “This is the Commander — any unit receiving, give me a status report.”

There is barely enough of a pause for a brief hiss of static before a very familiar voice echoes into Bradford’s ear.

“This is Menace,” Kelly responds, and she sounds remarkably calm. A small ball of tension Bradford hadn’t realized existed somewhere between his shoulder blades loosens at her voice. She reports quickly. “I’m in the armory, and I’ve got a team of three — no, four,” she corrects, and he can hear faint background chatter of more troops preparing in the armory through her radio, “suited up and ready to go. Where do you want us?”

The Commander blows out a breath of air, clearly relieved. “Menace,” he answers. “You’re my favorite. We’ve got a target for you about five hundred meters from our current location, and we’ll need a team on that and another team here keeping reinforcements at bay.”

“Shen,” Bradford asks, turning back to the engineer, “can you get the aft landing ramp down to use as a drop point?”

“Yes,” Shen confirms, so Bradford turns back to the display.

“Menace, Shen’s going to open up the aft landing ramp,” he informs her. “Take what team you’ve got and head for there. Is Marquez mobile?”

“He’s kitting more troops out now,” Kelly confirms. “The four of us are heading out; he’ll send reinforcements out as they come online. The barracks took a pretty hard hit, and we’ve got some wounded, so it might be a while before we’ve got two full squads on the ground.”

“Understood,” Bradford responds, and for a split-second, wonders if he should head to the armory himself to find a gun and join in the Avenger’s defense. But that’s a fleeting thought, and easily set aside: his job is here, and he knows it. Instead, he turns to the Commander, who is studying the display carefully. “Some of the engineers were working on getting some defensive turrets up and running a few weeks ago,” he reminds the Commander, and turns his mind toward how to keep the Avenger theirs.

He’s not entirely sure how long they’re grounded. Nine or ten hours, he thinks, judging from where the sun is as he listens to the engines start to power up around him again. Bradford can hear Kelly’s voice in his radio, coordinating with Sigfried Kleiner and counting heads as she double-checks that everyone is ready for lift-off, but it’s long, tense minutes before she says at last, “Ready when you are, Commander.”

“Lieutenant Singh, you heard the lady,” the Commander says to the man who managed to keep the Avenger aloft just long enough to make landing it feasible. “Let’s get this thing back up in the sky where we belong.”

“Yes, sir,” Singh agrees, and with quick, precise hands, he reaches for the Avenger’s controls and starts the lift-off procedure. They’ve got just a brief window of time before the next ADVENT reinforcements reach them, but Singh doesn’t flinch under the pressure. Bradford is fairly certain Singh is going to be a captain by nightfall, and though he dislikes the Commander’s heavy-handed use of promotion, in this case, he’s going to put in the recommendation for it himself. He’s honest enough to admit that he doubts he’d have had the skill to keep the Avenger from crashing if he’d been at the piloting station when they’d been hit with that first pulse, and it’s a relief to recognize that he might have finally trained up someone competent enough that he can pass over his piloting duties once and for all.

The Avenger doesn’t take off gracefully. It limps into the air on damaged landing struts, engines grumbling and protesting every increase in altitude, but Singh manages to get them up into the air and curving away from the blackened earth where they’d managed to make their defensive stand. No deaths, Bradford thinks with relief: casualties, yes, but injuries, not deaths. It’s more than he’d hoped for when the Avenger had fallen from the sky.

The Commander, his right arm now held close to his torso in a makeshift sling, seems to share his thoughts. “For as bad as that was,” he says, taking his radio from his ear as Singh confirms that they’ve reached a safe altitude with no immediate pursuit, “it could have gone a whole lot worse.”

Bradford agrees, coming around to the Commander’s side of the display. “Shen did good,” he agrees. “And Kelly and her troops came through, and I think you should promote Singh. Twice, probably.”

“I won’t argue with that,” the Commander mutters, eying Singh where he’s cautiously checking the autopilot. He brings up his good hand to rub at his temples. “That’s more excitement than I wanted for our graveyard maintenance shift, though God knows how much worse that would have been if Shen wasn’t on the bridge when we were hit.”

Bradford hesitates, but companionship and concern win out over his own tired mind. “I can stay on-duty here until night shift comes online,” he offers, though he’d really rather stumble off-duty and sleep for a solid eight hours. “Unless you want to pull the senior team for a post-mortem right away.”

The Commander grimaces. “No,” he decides quickly. “It’ll be morning before we’ll have any kind of order restored, and I don’t want to pull Shen or Tygan away from what needs to be done before then. Do we have any reports coming in yet?”

“Nothing from Kelly, but she’s probably still getting her team settled.” Bradford tells himself he’s not worried, and instead passes over a tablet. “Medical’s got their preliminary numbers coming in. Anyone not on the defensive team has been treated already, and we’re looking at generally minor injuries from the landing.” Honesty forces him to add, “A lot of the troops were injured in the drop but still went out to defend the Avenger. We’ll probably see more injuries than were originally reported as they make their way through medical.”

“And I suppose I should get down to Medical myself, to get this arm really looked at,” the Commander says ruefully. He takes the tablet from Bradford with his left hand. “I appreciate it, Central. Go off-duty as soon as night shift takes over.” His smile makes his face wrinkle. “It’s been a long day for you too, and even if you’re not quite as old as I am, you’re not young yourself anymore.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” Bradford grouses. “Morning meeting?”

“At eight hundred,” his superior decides, a solid two hours later than their usual start. “And if anything else crops up before then, well.” His smile is exhausted. “We’ll come up with something.”

Bradford stays on the bridge coordinating the recovery effort for the next few hours, as the Avenger slowly limps toward resuming normal operations. Shen pops in and out, looking considerably stressed each time, and a horde of bandaged and battered engineers follow in her wake, taking up assignments as she hands them out and looking relieved that she’s in charge. Bradford confers with Singh in low tones, and together they chart a course for the Avenger southward toward a landing spot they hope will be isolated enough to keep them out of enemy detection for the several days they’ll need to put themselves more fully back together. The autopilot is finicky, and they both eye it mistrustfully, but an hour later Shen patches through an update and it stabilizes.

About a half hour before he goes off-duty, Kelly’s report comes through. It’s done to her usual standards, neat and detailed without being overly fussy, but it’s a good deal longer than normal as she attempts to account for each of the many soldiers who wound up striding down the landing ramp to defend the Avenger. Bradford tabs through it with a mind already starting to shut down for the day. The Commander was right, he thinks ruefully, shutting his station down and preparing to pass it over to the second-string relief who will take over with both him and Singh off-duty: he’s getting old, and it’s been a long day.

It’s freeing to leave the bridge after almost twenty hours spent on it, to walk through empty and dimly-lit hallways to his own quiet quarters. The room is a mess, of course, but he’d expected that: clothes and blankets and the contents of his shelves and desk are jumbled across the floor from where they’d fallen during the Avenger’s crash. With a tired sigh, he sets to right what he can, shoving everything back up onto his desk without sorting just to get the floor clear enough to move around without stepping on things.

He’s mostly done when there’s a tap at his door, and he welcomes the interruption because it means he can reassure himself that Kelly’s not hurt. He opens the door, and she steps inside without a word. Almost before the door is shut, he reaches for her.

Bradford is halfway through embracing her before he realizes that she’s holding herself more tightly than usual. “You’re hurt?” he asks instantly, pulling away from her, his hands starting a quick pass across her body to test for injury.

Her, “No,” is swift, and she seems to realize that she’s frightened him, because she gives him a reassuring glance and a swift kiss. “No,” she says afterward, as he bends his forehead against hers for the sheer reassurance of having her near after a stressful day. Then she draws a not quite steady breath. “But,” she says, and doesn’t say more for a long minute.

“But,” he repeats, and feels worry open a pit in his stomach. “Kelly—”

“I made a mistake,” Kelly admits quickly, and though she’s standing with his arms around her, she’s not looking up at him. Her eyes are focused on his shoulder, and he wants to take her head in his hands and make her meet his gaze. But instead, he tightens his fingers on her waist and lets her talk. “I was still asleep here when the Avenger was hit — threw me right out of bed, actually.” She tries to smile, but can’t quite manage it. “I figured we were in trouble, so I threw on clothes and ran for the armory.”

Kelly takes another tight breath, and then confesses evenly, “I didn’t notice until after were we back on board and everything was over, but I grabbed your shirt off the floor, not mine, when I got dressed.”

Bradford stares down at her, confused. She means one of his undershirts, he supposes; they’re similar enough to her usual grey t-shirts that at first glance it’d be easy to confuse the one for the other, and given they’d left their clothes in a tangled pile on the floor the previous night, it’s not unbelievable that she snatched up the wrong one in her hurry to dress. It’d have been big on her, he figures, but it would have been perfectly fine as a base layer under her armor, and in the chaos of everything, he doesn’t find it strange that she didn’t realize her mistake until long after the fact. “So?” he manages, wondering why this is somehow a problem. 

“So,” she says, and finally meets his eyes. “Basically every soldier we have mobilized down to defend the Avenger, and we all came back in together afterward to the armory to put away our kits and do the usual debrief before showers and medical and so forth. More than a few people noticed that I was wearing a shirt that wasn’t mine once I was out of my armor and running the debrief.” Her sigh is quiet. “And they already knew that I wasn’t in the barracks when we got hit, and someone saw that I came to the armory from this side of Deck 6. And as the only people who have quarters over here are you, Shen, and Tygan…”

He snorts out a laugh before he can help himself. “And it damn well wasn’t Shen or Tygan’s shirt,” he realizes, amused. 

Kelly’s lips twitch toward what is almost a smile in return. “Yes,” she says. “Basically. And while no one said anything to my face, I could see them putting the pieces together.”

“They’re a smart bunch,” Bradford agrees. “They’ll figure it out.”

“They probably already have,” Kelly acknowledges carefully. “And while I left without confirming anything, there was some speculation, and now that they’ve got some idea of what’s going on…”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “They’ll talk.”

Her mouth tenses into a small, rueful grimace. “Yes, they will,” she says, and before he can respond, she looks down at his chest, where her hands rest side-by-side over his heart. “I’m sorry,” she adds, very quietly.

She’s nervous, Bradford realizes abruptly. She made a mistake — a very forgivable one, given the circumstances — and because of it, the rest of her team are now aware that she’s been spending her nights not in the barracks but with him. 

“It’s not your fault,” he tells her, not expecting the apology and surprised she felt the need to offer it. Still, she’s obviously distressed, so he gathers her closer against him. For the first time he can recall, she hesitates to come to him, just for a moment. Then that resistance vanishes, and she sighs and slides her hands around his sides to wrap them around his waist and rest her head against his chest. He wonders if she takes comfort from listening to his heartbeat the way he once relied on hers, and feels guilty that she so obviously thought he’d be upset at her for something that is clearly not entirely her fault. Is she so unaware of how much he values her, he wonders with sudden worry, that she thought he’d be ashamed for others to discover what they share?

The thought makes him feel contrite, and strangely protective of her. “So,” Bradford says again, and presses a single kiss against the top of her head. “Does it matter?”

He doesn’t realize how invested he is in her answer until it’s not the one he hoped for. But it’s not a denial, either: “What do you mean?” Kelly asks cautiously, pulling back just a bit to look up at him.

“This,” he says, though his point is rather lost as he doesn’t bother to let go of her to gesture between them. “Everyone else knowing about us. Does it matter?”

Her mouth twists in thought. “There’ll be talk,” she says. “Questions. You’ll probably escape the worst of it — you’re Central, and people are scared of you.” When he scoffs at that, her lips pull upward in a failed attempt at a smile, as though she can’t quite bring herself to manage it. “They are,” Kelly insists. “But they’ll want answers, and they’ll ask and guess and prod until they get them, and—”

She’s missing the point, and it’s not like her to do so. “Kelly,” he interrupts sharply, and he can see the nerves in her eyes when she looks up at him. “Kelly,” Bradford says again, softer, and he makes himself speak bluntly. “There’s going to be talk, and gossip, and all sorts of jokes about it behind our backs, and you’re going to get the worst of it for all kinds of reasons. And I’m not asking you to ignore all that — I’m asking if you can live with it.”

Kelly stares up at him, clearly surprised. After a moment, she bobs her head. “Yes,” she says faintly. “I can live with it.”

“Good,” Bradford says, and he means to say more but he finds himself kissing her instead, long and hard and needy until her fingers are fisted into the back of his shirt and his hands are tight on her hips. He takes a deep breath when they part, and forces himself to offer her a safe way out. “Look,” he says. “I’m old and bitter and washed up, and all I’ve got going for me is I’m a damn good Central Officer for XCOM. You’re the one getting the short end of the stick with this, so if you want to back out now before you’re stuck with —”

“No,” she says, so swiftly he doesn’t have the chance to even finish his thought. She looks up at him, astonished and fierce and everything he’s ever wanted. “No,” she repeats, and her hands tighten around his back. “I can live with everyone knowing, if you can.” And for the first time all night, she smiles at him, a real smile that makes the edges of her eyes crinkle and has lines creasing at the corners of her mouth. “I like being stuck with you.”

He kisses her, hard and fast. “Good,” he tells her when he lifts his lips from hers, starting to pull her with him further into his room toward his bed, “because I wasn’t planning on letting you go anytime soon. In some ways,” he adds, sitting down on the bed and dragging her into his lap so that he can just hold her and not worry about her trying to leave again, “it’s a relief to have it out there so we don’t need to worry about it.”

Kelly settles herself on his legs, tucking herself up against him and arranging herself so that it’s more comfortable for both of them. “I thought you’d be angry,” she says after a moment. Her hands are tight fists pulling at the fabric of his shirt, and he can hear the slight shudder of relief in her breath when she exhales. “You value your privacy, and you’ve pretty much made yourself Central with the rest of XCOM, not John Bradford. I thought you wouldn’t want to put up with everyone else knowing you had a bit of John left underneath it all, that you’d rather just stop and —”

“No,” he says firmly, his turn to interrupt her again, and he kisses her, very briefly. When he lifts his head, he finds his mouth is almost dry, his arms tight around her as if to ground himself. He forces himself to speak, what he’s wanted to say to her for months but hasn’t yet had the courage to voice.

“Look,” he tells her, and he makes himself be honest. “Kelly. I love you. I don’t plan on giving you up just because everyone knows it.”

Kelly stares up at him, and he watches something in her expression twist. For a moment, he fears that he’s said too much, that he’s frightened her away, because she lets go of him and pulls her arms away from where they have been gripping his shirt at his sides.

But then her hands snake up his front, and she reaches for his face with gentle fingers. She carefully pulls his head down to hers so that she can kiss him, her hands warm on his cheeks and her mouth soft on his. 

“John,” she says softly, and her lips quirk upward. “Central,” she adds, deliberately using both of the names she’s known him by, accepting both the man and the cause that’s defined him for decades. She kisses him again, and it’s almost brutally sweet, everything he dreams of and more. When he lifts his head from her mouth to breathe she follows him, sliding forward so that she can murmur into his ear, “I love you, too.”

His heart gives one solid lurch at his words, and then she kisses him again and his hands spasm tight on her hips. He can’t think past her words and somehow doesn’t feel the need to: he pulls her down with him onto his bed. She doesn’t mind, because she all but burrows herself into him in an effort to press herself tighter against him.

Bradford feels almost weightless now that he’s managed to speak the truth he’s carried silently for longer than he wants to admit. He wraps his arms around Kelly and pulls her close. Relief and a sort of awed pride war for room in his heart: she loves him, he thinks, and he has to shut his eyes because that thought is so completely overwhelming. It staggers him, so that he needs to hold onto her to keep himself grounded; Kelly gives a small, very contented sigh as his arms lock tight around her, and she nuzzles her head against his shoulder.

“So,” she says, and he can’t help but chuckle as he bends his head down to kiss her hair again.

“So,” he says back, and then she laughs as well.

“Not what I expected out of this conversation,” she admits after a moment. She gives a little wiggle, which Bradford has learned to interpret over the past months: as comforting as holding each other tight is, his bed is too small and too narrow to allow for easy sharing. He rolls onto his back, and she comes with him, so that after a few brief moments of rearranging, they’re more comfortably arranged. He reclines on his back, and she curls up against his side; it’s a tight fit, but she’s small enough to tuck herself up against him and he doesn’t mind the overlap of her legs tangling with his and her head on his shoulder. 

“Not really what I expected out of today either,” Bradford agrees once they’re settled. He strokes a hand through her hair, feeling a little more like his usual self. “You’re all right?” He’s not sure if he’s referencing their conversation or her time spent on the ground defending the Avenger.

“Yes,” she says. Her hand slides to rest on his chest, above where his heart beats. “I’m fine. You clearly came through all right on the bridge.”

“I’m okay,” he affirms, a bit touched to think of her worrying for him. “The Commander’s got a broken arm, though.”

He feels her wince against his shoulder. “That’s not going to be fun,” she mutters in sympathy, and there’s a long pause. “Well,” she says, and exhales a breath that is almost a laugh. “It’s been a long day, and we’ve got a meeting at eight hundred tomorrow. I should really head back to the barracks, but —”

“Stay,” he tells her instead, before she can finish speaking. “If everyone knows already, it doesn’t matter. Stay.”

“In for a penny,” she murmurs against his arm, and with a sigh, she pushes herself upright. She must read the confusion in his face as she moves away from him, because she laughs. For the first time all evening, as he looks at her Bradford doesn’t see any tension, any fear, any concern: just amusement and joy and something stronger than affection in her eyes. Something, he realizes with his chest tight and satisfied, something he has a name for now, something he’s seen in her eyes for longer than he can really recall. 

“John,” she says, and she gives him a brief kiss with her smile still in place. “I love you dearly. But I’m not sleeping in my combat boots, and you probably don’t want to sleep in your duty uniform.”

Bradford stares up at the empty ceiling of his room. “I suppose,” he concedes grudgingly, and it is strangely domestic to haul himself up out of bed to strip off his clothes and unlace his boots as Kelly does the same a foot away. His quarters are still mostly a mess, which doesn’t help them maneuver around each other in the small space; he finds a pair of soft sweatpants to use as nightclothes, and as he watches Kelly pull off her clothes, he searches for something for her to wear and finds that his fingers pause on one of his undershirts.

“Here,” he says, handing it to her.

She recognizes what it is, and her lips tilt upwards. But she makes no comment: instead, she accepts it wordlessly, and once she’s unbound her hair from her ponytail and removed most of her own clothes, she pulls his shirt on over her head.

It’s big on her, Bradford can see as it settles around her. The neckline is loose enough that it gapes open to reveal the delicate curve of her collarbone, and sleeves that are short on him drape most of the way to her elbows. The hemline falls at the middle of her thighs as she turns to face him, pulling her hair up from where it had been tucked into the shirt behind her neck. There is absolutely no way she could have passed this shirt off as being her own: she is quite clearly wearing something that belongs to him. He doesn’t expect the effect it has on him, the way something low in his belly coils into solid satisfaction.

“I think,” he tells her, a bit unsteadily, “you should always sleep in one of my shirts.”

Kelly looks up at him, and her lips curve into a deliciously satisfied smile as she recognizes the look in his eyes. “Should I?” she asks, her voice rich with humor and something darker, something full of promise and desire. She stretches, a fluid arch of her arms and back that sends his shirt riding higher up her thighs. “And why is that?”

It takes Bradford two steps to close the distance between them, and barely a second to gather her up so that she’s pressed tight against him. “Because I like knowing you’re mine,” he informs her, his voice more of a growl than he intended it to be, “and you are very obviously mine in this.” His hands slide across the loose fabric at her waist, bunching it between them as her searches for the dip of her waist beneath it. “It’s a good look on you.”

Her laughter is delighted and certain, and her hands drop down to land on his shoulders. “Possessive, are we?” she teases him as he pushes her back down to the bed.

There’s much he’d like to do to her — and he doesn’t particularly care, he thinks, if she keeps his shirt on for it or not — but it’s been a long day, and they’re both older than they’d like to admit. Instead of answering her verbally, Bradford settles them both onto his narrow bed in one of the few ways they’ve discovered they will both fit. She aligns herself beside him with a quiet sigh of contentment, and only once they’ve arranged themselves does he dip his head down to kiss her one more time.

“I love you,” he says, still amazed that he dares to speak the words out loud.

Kelly’s lips curve, and she kisses him once more before she rests her head against his arm. “I love you, too,” she reminds him, and he falls asleep holding her, his heart full and his mind content.


	24. 05-04: Acquiring Acceptance

# Acquisitions

## Section 5: Winning the Future

### Chapter 4: Acquiring Acceptance

To give the others credit, the morning meeting goes completely by the books until it’s practically over.

Tygan brings injury reports and scientific speculation about the electromagnetic pulse that knocked them from the sky, as well as an after-action summary about the effectiveness of Dr. Forester’s defense turrets. Shen presents a detailed list of the systems that she’s been forced to restart after their abrupt grounding, and a comprehensive summary of vulnerabilities that still remain given the Avenger’s known limitations. Kelly offers a careful assessment of her troops, individually and as teams, helping to define who had been key to defending the Avenger and who had risked leaving relative safety to destroy the EMP spike. Bradford coordinates the official systems reports, tying everything together to present the Commander with a clear overview of just how the past twenty-four hours affected XCOM.

The Commander sits at the edge of the table and listens closely to each data set as it is put forth before him, asking intelligent questions and reaching conclusions the rest of them might have missed. It’s a worrisome thing, they all agree, to have the aliens so intent upon recapturing the Avenger just as they’re starting to prepare for what they hope will be a decisive strike against ADVENT. Procedures and policies are going to have to change in the aftermath of the previous day’s devastation, and it takes them well over two hours to delve through everything that needs to be covered now that they know what the aliens can bring to bear against them.

It’s not until the meeting is over that there’s any hint that that people are thinking about anything but the logistics vital to XCOM’s survival.

“So, Central,” the Commander drawls with a straight face, just as Bradford thinks he’s going to escape the meeting without being confronted with the rumors he knows are going around the Avenger. “I don’t suppose you have anything else new to report?”

Bradford pauses, almost at the door of the Commander’s quarters, and turns to look back at the rest of the room. Shen and Tygan are still sitting at the briefing table. Kelly is sliding away from Shen’s side to exit the briefing table, and across from her, the Commander leans back against his couch, a grin wide and irreverent stretching across his face.

“Something new?” Bradford repeats neutrally where he stands by the door. He tries to ignore Tygan’s fairly poor poker face and Shen’s outright muffled giggle, and very deliberately does not look at Kelly.

The Commander leans back into his seat, amused and not bothering to hide it. “I’ve heard rumors,” he drawls out, “that you and our Menace have paired off.”

Bradford snorts. “That’s not new, Commander,” he corrects. “What, is it suddenly a problem now?”

“Not _new_?” Shen protests with a sputter of surprise. She looks with disbelieving eyes at Kelly, who is maneuvering around the opening out of the couches around the mission table. Kelly’s not quite smiling, but there’s definitely amusement etched across her face. “Since _when_?” Shen demands.

“Probably for a few years now, unless I miss my mark,” Tygan says, his rich voice amused and speculative. He turns to Kelly with a glint in his eyes that is more fond than curious. “At least, that’s how long she’s had Central listed as her next-of-kin.”

“Doctor-patient confidentiality, Dr. Tygan,” Kelly chides mildly, instead of contradicting him. She looks up at Bradford with the barest trace of embarrassment. His lips twitch, amused: how long, he wonders with a surge of affection, did the two of them needlessly dance around admitting what they both wanted? She recognizes the direction his thoughts have taken, and gives him a faint smile as she comes to her feet beside the mission table.

“A few _years_?” Shen’s mouth snaps shut with an almost-audible click. “Seriously?”

The Commander laughs, long and loud, as Kelly takes a step away from the table. He gives Bradford a sidelong glare that is far more amused than angry. “You sneaky son-of-a-bitch,” he accuses, though the delight in his voice ruins any chance of his words being mistaken for an insult. He outright chortles. “I ought to take you for task for fraternization.”

“Good luck with that,” Bradford retorts, completely unworried. “It’s not against any regs these days, and if it took you this long to figure it out, then you know damn well we can manage without affecting official operations.”

The Commander shakes his head, still grinning. “True enough,” he allows. “Still. I’m impressed — you used to be crap at keeping secrets. Menace,” he adds, switching his gaze to Kelly as he leans back deeper into his seat, his smile stretching even wider. “That’s clearly your influence. You’re sure you know what you’ve gotten yourself into with him?”

“I have some vague idea,” Kelly answers dryly. She gives Bradford a very small smile, as professional and polite as ever, though her eyes are dancing with mirth she’s not letting herself voice. Then she looks back at the briefing table, where the Commander is still shaking with laughter and Shen is staring at her in utter confusion. “I assume you’re not going to court-martial me or anything?”

“What, and lose my best operative?” the Commander teases. “We tried that once; it didn’t go so well. You’re too important to court-martial.” He lifts his uninjured left hand in blessing. “I don’t care what you two get up to in your off hours as long as you’re both on-duty when I need you. There, Menace: happy?”

“Yes, actually,” Kelly answers. “Thanks.” And she gifts the Commander with Bradford’s favorite version of her smile, small and solid and self-satisfied. Then her eyes flicker across Tygan — who is looking remarkably smug — to Shen. But she doesn’t say anything to her friend; instead, she looks back at the Commander. “Then I’ll get to work on a preliminary team for that transmitter station,” she tells him, voice businesslike despite the smile still on her face. “I’ll have some options for you by the end of the day.”

Kelly has to pass by Bradford to leave the room. He can see the laughter in her eyes as she steps alongside him. “Central,” she acknowledges, her lips twitching in the effort not to laugh.

“Menace,” he returns affably enough, finding the whole situation more entertaining than he expected, and he steps to the side to let her pass through the door. Only once she’s safely out into the hallway does Bradford look back at his superior officer. “Was there really anything else, or are we done?”

Tygan nudges Shen to start the awkward slide required to exit the round couches around the briefing table, and the Commander, his smile still in place, waves his hand briefly. “No, no, we’re done,” he decrees. “I’d say that’s enough excitement for the morning.” And he gives one final short laugh as he dismisses Bradford from the meeting. 

It is not the most comfortable day Bradford has ever endured, but it’s not awful, either. He suspects Kelly is being given more grief about their relationship than he is, for the simple fact that she’s far friendlier with most other people on the Avenger and thus has more people who feel comfortable bringing it up around her than he does. Not for the first time, Bradford doesn’t regret being so firmly cemented into his role as Central within XCOM: it means that while he occasionally catches a speculative gaze or overhears quickly hushed up whispers, very few people dare say anything to his face.

Tygan, of all people, is the first to comment on it, shortly after lunchtime when they all gather together once more in his lab for an update on the latest research his team’s produced. At the end of a purely professional and potentially groundbreaking intelligence session, Tygan looks down at a tablet on his desk. “Oh, and Central,” he adds, stopping Bradford as he’s on his way out the door. “On an entirely different subject, I can update your own next-of-kin records for you now, if you’d like.”

It takes Bradford a full minute to figure out what Tygan is talking about, and then his brain catches up. “Yeah,” he decides. “That’s probably a good idea. Can you just do that, or do I need officially request anything?”

“I can handle it,” the doctor assures him, and his smile is faint and almost apologetic. “But you’ll need to authorize the update. And,” he adds, a little less professionally, “I must admit, I had wondered why the colonel had you listed for her next-of-kin. I’m pleased to have that mystery solved.”

Bradford lifts an eyebrow, but decides not to comment on it. Instead, he waits while Tygan makes the necessary edit to make Kelly his own next-of-kin, and signs off on it without bothering to say more than, “Thanks, doctor,” as he leaves the room.

It’s cowardly of him, but he deliberately takes a later dinner than usual, waiting for the majority of the day shift to filter through the mess hall before he takes up his own tray to eat. It makes for a quieter meal than regular days, which is a relief, and Bradford mentally congratulates himself on escaping the worst of things as he leaves.

To his surprise, he finds Kelly waiting for him in the hallway outside his room. “Hey, Central,” she greets him casually as he steps up to his door. 

“Menace,” he responds, unable to keep from chuckling at their careful professionalism in the public hallway for all they’re about to enter his quarters obviously together. He presses his fingers to the sensor on the door, and hears it pop unlocked. He opens the door, and gestures. “After you.”

She ducks ahead of him into the room, and he follows her. When he turns back from shutting the door behind him, her smile is warm. “Let’s try that again,” Kelly murmurs, stepping forward to meet him as he reaches for her. As he wraps his arms around her and pulls her closer, her smile spreads as she looks up at him. “Hello, John.”

He laughs despite himself. “Hello, Kelly,” Bradford says, amused, and then kisses her in greeting. When he breaks the kiss to look down on her, he ventures, “So, first day with everyone knowing — how bad was it?”

Kelly grimaces. “Well,” she says. “I think it’s safe to say no one else is talking about anything else today, despite everything that happened yesterday.”

He sighs. “Damn it,” he grouses, and eyes her fondly. “Still worth it?”

Her laugh is low and affectionate. “Still worth it,” she tells him, and rocks up onto her toes to kiss him again. “And let’s look on the bright side: for once I didn’t have to sneak my way over here after night shift started.”

“True enough,” he says, and considers. “The way I figure it, there’s no real need for you to keep your bunk in the barracks at this point.”

“You don’t mind sharing what little space you have?” she asks wryly, gesturing around the already-cramped room.

“Not with you,” he admits, and maybe it should feel more momentous than this. In the old world, back when he’d been little more than a promising Army officer, he’d never invited any of his admittedly less serious girlfriends to move in with him, which is what he’s more or less suggesting now. But this offer — made casually but meant sincerely — feels less like some kind of turning point and more like a confirmation of what he already knows. Sharing his quarters with Kelly isn’t a new development, Bradford realizes, not really: it just makes what they’ve been slowly sliding into a bit easier to maintain without the fiction of Kelly keeping her own space.

Kelly seems to feel the same way, because she gives him an easy smile. “I don’t have all that much to move,” she says. “And it’s pretty much a mess in here right now anyway, given yesterday. What if I go gather my things now, and meet you back here in a few minutes?”

“Sounds good to me,” he agrees, and because he can, he leans forward to kiss her again before she leaves. “You think you can manage braving the barracks on your own?”

He can hear her huff out a breath — not quite a laugh, but almost. “If I’m not back in a half hour,” she says, stepping toward the door, “send backup.”

It is almost exactly a half hour before there’s a tap on his door. Kelly’s true to her word: she brings a single bag with her when she moves in, and it’s easy enough to clear space for her in his niche of a closet and to surrender one of his two shelves for her few personal possessions.

“You can probably have this back, actually,” Bradford tells her, sorting through his own belongings as she finds new homes for her things. He picks up a grey ballcap from where it had been tossed aside on his desk: he’d inherited it from her locker, back when they’d thought her dead, and he’s kept it since then out of pure sentimentality.

Kelly glances at it, and does a fairly comical double-take as she realizes what he’s offering her. “Is that mine?” she marvels, and takes it from his hand.

He grimaces, not quite embarrassed but a bit off-kilter at admitting why he saved it. “It was with the rest of the stuff in your locker. It was what I kept when it all passed on to me.”

“My — oh.” Her face abruptly goes slack, and she looks up at him in alarm. “I didn’t even think. You were my next-of-kin, weren’t you? So when I was captured, and you all thought…” She winces. “That’s what Tygan meant earlier.”

“Yeah.” And curiosity drives him to ask simply, “A few years ago — really?”

Bradford’s not sure what reaction he expected, but watching Kelly slowly flush without looking up at him, he feels warmth settle in his chest. “Yes,” she admits, turning her hat over in her hands. “Um. I think part of it was just realizing that I could depend on you, and that I trusted you, and that we made a good team. I mean, we’d worked together before, but the whole Skyranger mission just sort of drove it home for me, that of everyone out here in XCOM, I could rely on you if I needed someone to make emergency decisions and such for me if anything happened. And part of it,” she adds, still looking at the hat and not him, though there’s a rueful smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, “was that you are really attractive, and I’d spent the better part of a month kissing you back during that Skyranger mission, and that may have clouded my judgment a little.”

He wants to laugh, but instead he feels almost humbled. She twists the hat in her hands once more before she finally dares to look up at him. “So yeah,” Kelly says, and her smile is almost hesitant. “I mean, I didn’t love you back then, not like I do now, but — you were the only one I could think of, when Dr. Tygan came out with all that official paperwork, and so I put your name down for next-of-kin.” She gestures with the hat. “I’m sorry I never told you before it became necessary. I always meant to, but —” She looks down. “Well. I never managed to actually find a way to bring it up. And I suppose I was worried you would refuse it, and tell me to change it.”

Bradford crosses the room in a single long step to crouch down in front of her, so that she’s looking down at him from where she sits on the edge of his bed — their bed, now. “I’m glad you put my name down,” he tells her honestly, and since she still looks faintly mortified about it, he pulls the ballcap from her hands and very lightly tosses it back onto the desk. Because it seems only fair to be as open with her as she was with him, he adds, “It meant a lot to me, when Tygan told me. Probably more than it should have.” It’s his turn to hesitate, and he debates just keeping his mouth shut. Instead, though, he sighs out a long breath, and reaches to take her hands in his. “I don’t think I knew I loved you until you didn’t come home.”

Her head is almost even with his, with her sitting on the bed and him all but kneeling in front of her, and so he can see her face shift toward regret. “John,” she whispers, and she shuts her eyes. She takes one deep breath, and on the exhale, her eyes open, luminous and clear. “Kiss me?” she asks him quietly, reaching for him.

He kisses her until she pulls him up and back onto the bed over her. It’s quiet and sweet and perfect: an affirmation, slow and complete, of what they share together. They roll, reversing positions: Kelly crawls across him with trailing fingers and gentle touches, and he arches up against her and doesn’t stop kissing her skin even when she pushes him back against the bed and drapes herself over him until he’s all but desperate to fill her. She slides herself onto him as they kiss, and they lose themselves in each other, in slow rolls of her hips and shared breaths and his fingers tight on her skin. 

Afterward, he wraps his arms around her and holds her until they both stop trembling. “I knew I loved you,” Kelly admits unsteadily from within the safe shelter of his arms, “when you kissed me during Gatecrasher.”

Bradford wants to laugh, but he can’t summon up the energy. Instead, “I kissed you an awful lot during Operation Gatecrasher,” he reminds her, his fingers playing with her dark hair where it spreads across her back.

Her hum is quiet and amused. “True enough,” she agrees. “But only once after the operation really started.” And, because it must be fairly obvious that he can’t bring his mind into enough order to remember what she’s talking about, Kelly huffs out a laugh and lifts her head off his chest. “In the safe-house,” she reveals. “Right before we left to meet the extraction team.” Her mouth curves, satisfied and fond, and she stretches forward to press a gentle kiss to the side of his throat. “I was about to head out and you kissed me.” She touches her lips to his neck again, and her laugh is low and very near his ear. “For luck.”

“It was a good excuse,” he recalls, and slides his hands down the bare skin of her back to rest them on the curve of her waist. “Mostly, I just really wanted to kiss you one last time.”

She hums again, still amused, and shifts her body so that she can kiss his jawline beneath his ear. “I told myself it was just stress,” she tells him, softly, like she’s sharing a secret. “That it was just our covers, that none of it mattered, and that it was a good thing we hadn’t gotten drunk and carried away when we might’ve. I’d just about convinced myself that it was better that way, and I told myself it was over and done and I shouldn’t let any of it bleed over after we walked out of the apartment.” Her lips drift across his jawline; his muscles tense under their touch despite the languid exhaustion spread through his limbs. “That was my plan, at least. Then you kissed me anyway, even though the mission was started, and I realized that I might be in trouble.”

“Trouble, hm?” he can’t help but tease her, squeezing her waist where his hands curve around her hipbones. She’s loved him for almost a year, he realizes in awe, and he looks up at her unable to hide his amazement. 

“Definitely trouble,” Kelly agrees, and pokes him in his ribs. He jumps despite himself, fingers spasming around her hips. “You then promptly got yourself shot.”

“Hey,” he protests, not sure if he’s amused or offended. “You were the one who went and got yourself killed.”

Kelly stills where she leans over him, and he’s suddenly sorry for reminding them both of her captivity. “Yeah,” she agrees on a shaky breath. “I suppose I did.” And she settles herself back down against him. “I’m sorry.”

Bradford slides his hands back up her back, partly to soothe her, partly to reassure himself. “It’s okay,” he lies, fingers pressing unsteadily against her bare skin. “It worked out.”

She rests her head down against his chest. “Dr. Tygan gave you my things, then,” she murmurs, and she huffs out a breath that isn’t quite a laugh. “Hell of a way to find out I’d put you down as my next-of-kin. I’m sorry.”

He runs his hands up through her hair. “It meant a lot to me,” he tells her again. “I didn’t mind.”

“I’m still sorry,” Kelly says, and she props herself up over him to look down at him. “I should have told you beforehand.”

He considers his words, and then says again, “I didn’t mind.” He moves one hand from her hair to touch the freckles spreading across her cheekbones. “I didn’t realize how hard it would hit me, having you gone. Finding out that you’d made me next-of-kin was… not really closure, but something like it.” His blunt fingers skim across her skin. “A sign that maybe… I don’t know.” Words fail him; his hand drops from her face. “It meant a lot.”

“John,” Kelly murmurs, and she looks away from him abruptly. Her voice wavers on his name, and almost cracks; she slumps forward, and her forehead comes to rest on his chest once more. Her breathing hitches, and then catches again, and Bradford has the sudden realization that she is struggling not to cry.

He sits up so swiftly he nearly dislodges her before he can pull her closer and rearrange her to rest in his lap. He says just her name, softly, and her laughter is broken and weak but still there.

“I’m all right,” she claims, and she draws in a long shaky breath, curling herself up against him. “I’m all right.”

She’s not, he thinks, but neither is he: they’re both broken by twenty years of alien occupation, and they’re coming into what might be their final days once more after a year of victories and progress. They don’t have to hide this stress from each other anymore, the way they once did before Operation Gatecrasher. They both know more fully now what they have to risk and lose, and the two weeks where she was thought dead weren’t easy on either of them. She still has nightmares about her captivity, he knows, and he still thinks about it every time he sends her with her team down groundside on a mission.

Kelly takes a steadier breath as he rubs his hands up and down her back. “I’m all right,” she repeats a final time. Her smile is faint but solid. “I just…” And for once, she seems to struggle with words as much as he usually does; he presses an open-mouthed kiss to her shoulder, and she sighs and leans into his touch. 

“When this is over,” Bradford tells her, “I want those two weeks back.”

She huffs out what is not quite a laugh. “Two weeks?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, the idea firming in his mind. “You were dead for two weeks, and when we have the chance, I want them back. You and me, off duty — hell, maybe off the Avenger — for two solid weeks.”

“Done,” she agrees instantly, and then she does laugh. “Just let me know when things are over and you feel settled enough to claim them.” 

Kelly’s voice is fond, even understanding, and she kisses him lightly to take the sting out of her words. But she’s hit on the real problem, he thinks ruefully as they climb out of bed to dress and finish dealing with the night’s routine tasks and duties. Even if everything goes perfectly — even if in a few days they manage to break the Avatar Project and end whatever the aliens are trying to do to Earth — it’s not as though their work will be done anytime soon. It’ll take years, at the minimum, to dislodge the aliens enough to get a foothold toward feeling secure again, and it’ll be probably at least that long before XCOM is calm enough that either of them can step away from their roles to take anything even resembling a vacation.

Still, he likes the idea of it, and even as they trade quiet assessments back and forth about the transmitter mission she’ll lead in the morning, he can’t stop thinking about it. In a different world, Bradford thinks, in one the aliens hadn’t conquered, he’d put in a request for leave and drag her off for two weeks. 

He’d take her someplace warm, he imagines, eying Kelly where she sits perched on the edge of the bed frowning down at her tablet. He’s never seen her in a swimsuit. He’s never seen her wear a dress, or any kind of skirt, or shoes that aren’t well-worn sneakers or solid combat boots. He’s only rarely seen her with her hair down — mostly only when she’s in his bed and his hands have mussed it — and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her wear jewelry or makeup, even during their undercover assignments. 

There’s a whole host of little things from the old, ADVENT-free world that he’s never experienced with Kelly. He’s never driven in a car with her or gone grocery shopping with her. They’ve never had a real date, or a meal out together that wasn’t undercover. He’s never seen a movie with her, or sat beside her on a couch to watch a sports game or television show; he’s never spent a lazy day with her working on errands or household projects.

Instead, Bradford knows four ways to wordlessly tell her that their mission is compromised and two ways to gesture at her to tell her to cover his flank. He knows what her face looks like when she’s masking pain, and he can predict almost to the minute how long before she starts impatiently tapping her fingers against the table during overly repetitive mission briefings. He doesn’t know her hobbies or what she likes to read, but he knows how she wants her tactical belt arranged and where she carries her knives. 

It’s not a trade-off he thinks about often, but now he watches her prepare for bed and wonders about everything they’ve had stolen from them by ADVENT’s new world. Not, Bradford admits, that there would have been a reason for them to meet in the old world: she’d probably be in Ireland somewhere, though he still doesn’t know what she’d been doing before aliens had ruined her old life, and he’d have been probably retired from the Army by now if XCOM and the aliens hadn’t put those vague future plans on abrupt hold.

Still, he finds for the first time that he’s thinking about how she might have fit into his life if the aliens hadn’t come to Earth. Would he have still loved her, if he’d been just thirty-five and an Army captain when they’d met? Would she have still wanted him if she’d met him before she’d been hardened into someone willing to risk her life retaking Earth? Would they have shared a more traditional courtship — dates and overnights and moving in together, meeting families and friends and juggling his deployments and her career — if they’d met in an alien-free world?

The thought of it makes him smile, for all he finds the fantasy a ridiculous one. Kelly notices as she slides her way to the far side of the bed to make room for him to join her. “You look pretty pleased with yourself,” she teases.

Bradford eases himself down onto the bed beside her, and they take a moment to figure out how to best fit together for the night on the small bed. “Yeah,” he agrees, not bothering to deny her observation. And, before he can over-think the direction his mind has taken him, he tells her, “I wonder what we’d have thought of each other, if we’d met back before ADVENT took things over.”

Kelly’s laugh is low and delighted against his skin, and she wraps her arms around his arm where it lies beside her. He tends to sleep on his back, and she generally sleeps on her side tucked against him, though they’ve admittedly managed relatively few nights together. Cramped bunk space notwithstanding, he’s looking forward to sharing the bed more regularly with her. 

“I’ve thought about it,” she admits. “I can’t figure out how we’d have met without ADVENT, though. But,” she adds daringly, “doesn’t mean I haven’t wondered a bit what you were like before all this.”

He’s amused by the idea. “Younger,” he answers wryly. “A little more patient, a lot more by-the-book, a lot less…”

“Tired,” she finishes for him, in place of the other, less-flattering words he’d been trying to decide between. She kisses his shoulder, and rests her head there. “I’d have been younger myself. Unsure, still working hard to prove myself. A lot more innocent, really,” she remembers. Her sigh isn’t entirely nostalgic. “But still, I would have probably thought you were a stunner.” And, when he can’t help but laugh, he can feel her lips curve against his shoulder. “And I’d have probably made a fool of myself getting you to notice me, because I was awful at chatting up boys.”

He can’t imagine Kelly as young and socially awkward, not when he’s watched her rely on her skill with words to survive more undercover assignments than he can count. Bradford grins. “Now there’s a picture,” he teases her.

“You’re welcome,” she says wryly, but she’s smiling as she closes her eyes. The sigh she gives as she squirms a little closer to him is content. “If we’d met in the old world twenty years ago,” she murmurs, “I’d have convinced you to come out with me down to the pub just so I could show you off to my friends, and we’d have sat at the little corner table by the fireplace, and I’d have spent the whole time sitting in your lap and ignoring my friends to kiss you.”

Amusement and affection coil tight around his heart. “I think you could have talked me into that,” he decides, twisting the arm she’s holding so that he can take one of her hands in his. “Kissing you all night would have been a hell of an incentive.”

Her fingers squeeze around his hand, and he can hear the smile in her voice. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she whispers, sleepy and content, and she presses a kiss against his skin. “Good night, John.”

Bradford shifts to kiss her forehead. “Good night, Kelly,” he returns softly. He reaches his other hand up the switch on the wall above his head, to turn off the room’s lights.

He doesn’t sleep as quickly as he expected, though Kelly’s breathing slows and eventually evens out. Instead, he lies in bed and finds he can’t stop his mind from wandering down speculative pathways, revealing quiet fantasies he’d never known he’d ever want. After nearly half an hour, he bends his head down so that his lips brush against Kelly’s hair where her head rests against his shoulder. He’s not entirely sure if she’s asleep yet or not, but as he takes a suddenly certain breath, he decides it doesn’t matter.

“If this was the old world,” Bradford says, voice low so he won’t wake her if she’s actually sleeping, “I’d ask you to marry me.”

Her breathing doesn’t falter, and for a moment he’s sure she’s asleep. Then he feels her smile against his shoulder, the way her lips curve unmistakable against his skin even in the darkness. “If this was the old world,” she answers softly, “I’d say yes.”

He rolls onto his side to better wrap his arms around her, and feels her settle close against his heart. He doesn’t say anything else — what else is there to say? — but his hands are gentle, almost reverent, on her skin, and her sigh as she tucks her head against his chest is content.

It’s not the old world, and there are some things he’ll never have because of ADVENT and aliens and the new world order they’ve forced onto Earth. He’ll never have the kind of life he might have one day hoped for twenty years ago. There’s no American dream waiting for him: no white picket fence, no quiet house, no wife, no children. He probably won’t ever really retire, and even if XCOM is successful against ADVENT, he’ll probably never again see the world return to the way it had been twenty years ago. 

But for all the new world has stolen, Bradford recognizes, it’s managed to give him this: Jane Kelly, friend and partner and lover, nothing he ever expected and more than he knew he needed.

She’s enough, he thinks, curling his bigger body around hers, and he bends his head over hers and holds her until her heartbeat soothes him to sleep.


	25. 05-05: Acquiring Determination

# Acquisitions

## Section 5: Winning the Future

### Chapter 5: Acquiring Determination

The Commander falls into step with him out in the hallway going back to the bridge the night Kelly’s small three-person team returns from the transmitter station.

“We need another senior staff meeting tonight,” the Commander says without preamble. “I want to accelerate our timetable for using our Avatar, and I don’t want there to be any surprises.”

Bradford can’t say he’s particularly surprised. “When do you want to meet?” he asks.

“Call it forty-five minutes from now. I need to track everyone else down. I’ll want you to bring whatever info you’ve got on that gateway. I think we can’t afford to not move on this.” They step into the elevator together. “This is it, Central. This has to be it.”

Bradford doesn’t disagree. “We can make it work,” he agrees as the lift slides into upward motion.

The Commander leans forward and jabs a long finger out against the elevator’s controls. The elevator jerks to a stop, held between decks, and the Commander hauls in a breath as he turns to face Bradford. Bradford, surprised by the stop, watches the Commander’s face set itself into stern lines. “Major Bradford,” the Commander says slowly, and the hair on the back of Bradford’s neck prickles. “I’m going to control that Avatar or die trying, and I’m going to take a team through that gateway even if we don’t have an exit plan.”

He can’t even remember the last time the Commander called him by his name, much less by the last official rank he held. Their first day working together, he thinks, back when he’d truly been simply Major Bradford and not yet XCOM’s Central Officer. Bradford inhales a breath and lets it out slowly. “Yes, sir,” he says, lapsing back into military protocol for a formal response. He looks up at his friend’s thin face, his rather wasted frame, the arm still cradled in a sling at his side, and nods once. “I understand.”

“Do you?” The Commander’s face is set to neutral, and he meets Bradford’s eyes squarely. “I’m taking Jane Kelly with me,” he says, and it’s the first time in almost a year Bradford’s heard the Commander use her real name and not her call-sign.

The real reason for the elevator stop, Bradford thinks. He forces himself to nod: he can’t say he likes the idea, but he’s been expecting this news ever since they learned what this mission would entail. 

“Yeah,” he agrees quietly, on an inhale that is not quite regretful. “You’ll need her.” A smile tugs at his lips despite himself. “You always were worthless groundside, and she’s good enough to cover for that.”

The Commander barks out a laugh, breaking the tension. He looks away. “If we don’t come back,” he says, “it’ll be up to you to keep things going.”

Bradford lets out a slow, even breath. “It depends,” he says after a moment. “If you don’t come back because you’ve failed, then there won’t be much left for us to do. We’ll be overrun eventually, even if we go to ground. I can run a few retaliation strikes, give the resistance camps some warning of what to expect, see what I can do about getting as many folks as I can off the grid. But if you fail…” He shakes his head. “It’s all or nothing, Commander. If you fail, anything I do isn’t going to be more than a stop-gap measure to buy a few people a little more time to run.”

“Yes,” the Commander agrees evenly after a moment. “That’s true.” He tilts his head and looks back at Bradford. “But if we manage to win, and if this is the turning point the world needs, and if even though we’re victorious, we can’t get back through this gate…”

Bradford doesn’t want to think about that: his best friend and his lover dying victorious but trapped somewhere they can’t escape. Still, he’s devoted more than twenty years of his life to XCOM, and he knows when he needs to be Central rather than merely John Bradford. He knows what will need to be done. “Then we’ll keep up the fight,” he promises his superior. His smile is tight, and doesn’t quite reach his eyes, but it’s fierce. “Whatever you can give us, we’ll put to use. This is our world, Commander, and if you die giving us the chance to take it back, we’re damn well not going to waste it.”

The Commander nods. “Good,” he says, and though his right arm is still in a sling, he holds out his left hand to offer not a salute but a handshake. His fingers are thin, but his grip is strong. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Yeah,” Bradford says, fighting the urge to shift his shoulders as he tries to discard that particular fear. “I’m not particularly fond of that plan myself.”

The Commander reaches out to restart the elevator. “Yeah,” he admits, and his expression is wry. “It’s definitely not my first choice.” And, as the elevator jerks back into motion, he turns to face the front of the elevator. Without looking at Bradford, he says, “I’ll bring her home for you, Central. It’s the least I can do.”

Bradford doesn’t have a response to that. He swallows, hard, and looks away from his oldest friend to stare at the metal walls of the elevator. “Thanks,” he manages, and spends the rest of the short elevator trip trying hard not to think about winning the world but losing his two closest friends in the process.

“My quarters, forty-five minutes from now,” the Commander reminds him as they leave the elevator. Bradford turns left, toward the bridge; the Commander turns right. “Bring whatever intel you’ve got. And,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, “whatever booze you can find. God knows we could use a drink with all this.”

All things considered, it’s a short planning session, and very little like any of the dozens of meetings they’ve held before. There are too many unknowns, and far too many contingencies they can’t possibly plan for, and so many uncertainties that it’s almost impossible to organize even their preliminary findings.

“That’s it,” the Commander declares after an increasingly frustrating forty minutes. “I give up. Who wants a drink?”

The four other members of the senior staff look back and forth between them, and share a series of curious glances and shrugs.

“As long as I don’t have to sit around this table anymore,” Shen decides, scooting herself to the exit, “I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

The Commander waves at his personal sofa, the only other seat in his quarters. “Make yourself at home,” he says grandly. “I’ve got vodka, whiskey, and something that is probably tequila. What’s your poison?”

In short order, the five of them have migrated away from the briefing table toward the sofa and the low table in front of it. There isn’t enough room for all five of them on the sofa, of course; Tygan is offered the Commander’s desk chair, and Bradford chooses to sit on the edge of the coffee table, leaving the sofa to the others. The Commander sits flanked by the two women on the senior staff, and once they’re all settled, he lifts a glass.

“To XCOM and Earth and victory,” he toasts, and everyone lifts their own glasses in hope and acknowledgment. 

They drink in silence for a moment, all of them somehow unsure with each other and with why the Commander’s asked them to stay after the meeting for a social gathering, and the Commander lets the silence stretch out long enough that Bradford wonders if he really had a purpose beyond companionship for gathering them all together. But then the Commander speaks abruptly.

“We’ll announce the mission to your troops tomorrow,” he tells Kelly, and she nods, “and I don’t know how fast after that we’ll be making our final strike through that gate afterward. I thought we deserved one last night off — together — before everyone on the Avenger finds out what’s going on. The mood will shift,” he reminds them, “and we’re the senior staff. We’ve got to hold everyone together, no matter what.”

“My engineers are solid,” Shen announces proudly. “Whatever you need done, they’ll manage. We can do this.” She looks around the group. “We can do this,” she repeats, stubbornly, and lifts her glass. “Here’s to us. Even if,” she adds, with a rather annoyed glance at Kelly, “some of us keep more secrets than we ought to.”

Kelly just sips her drink, though there might be a smirk lurking behind the rim of her glass.

Tygan, surprisingly, is the one to laugh, a low chuckle that Bradford can barely remember hearing before. “I cannot possibly,” he says in his rich amused voice, “be the only one who saw this coming.”

“What?” Shen protests.

The Commander laughs, and lifts his glass. “Do tell,” he invites, and Bradford rolls his eyes.

“Is this really something we need to talk about?” he mutters, and takes a long sip of whiskey.

Shen glares at him. “Well maybe if you weren’t such a —”

“Lily,” Tygan interrupts, sounding amused, and Bradford’s not sure he’s ever heard anyone but Kelly refer to Shen by her actual name before. “Kelly has listed Central as her emergency contact and next-of-kin for as long as I’ve kept records. They’ve worked together undercover — together,” he emphasizes, “pretending to be married, for months. And certainly, I think I have new questions about the veracity of those Ecker novels.” His gaze swings to Kelly, frankly assessing her. “Especially considering this new information.” He looks back to Shen. “And you’re honestly surprised to discover there’s a grain of truth behind all of that?”

Shen winces and looks down at her drink, but the Commander’s interest is clearly piqued. “Wait, what?” he asks, and looks to Bradford. “I don’t know what I want to hear about more, undercover marriages or these novels.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Bradford sighs out. “This is why we didn’t want anyone else to find out about it.”

“No, no, no,” the Commander laughs. “I want to hear about this. This is too good to pass up.”

Kelly saves him. As Bradford takes another long drink of his whiskey, she shakes her head. “It’s not that exciting,” she admits, and glances up at the Commander where he sits beside her. “We used a married cover a few times together — including Gatecrasher, when we managed to get you back,” she tells the Commander. She shrugs. “And we did it well enough to convince the author of the Ecker books that it was real, and she decided to run with it for her novels, I guess.”

“I knew it must have been that author you two made friends with,” Shen mutters, and she takes a gulp of her drink. “Just promise me one thing,” Shen says when she lowers her glass. “You’re not, like, really secretly married or anything?” And, as the Commander’s laughter redoubles in intensity, she defends herself. “Look, if he’s actually Conrad Ecker, and if you’re actually Alice Greely, and they got married at the end of the first book, which is apparently actually about that Skyranger mission no matter what you’ve told me otherwise — it’s not that dumb of a question!”

“I knew those damn books were going to cause trouble,” Bradford grumbles with a wince.

“Lily,” Kelly assures her friend with a laugh, “we are not secretly married. I promise.”

“Just apparently sleeping together,” Shen mutters, and then takes another drink. “No, no, I don’t want to know.” She sets her glass down. “But Kelly, I swear, next time we manage some off-time together we’re going to have a talk.”

“Fair enough,” Kelly allows gracefully enough, and to Bradford’s great relief, the conversation moves on from there to other topics.

He’s not precisely friends with most of the senior staff. Kelly and the Commander, certainly, but Shen’s more Kelly’s friend than his, and Tygan is hardly someone Bradford would choose to sit down and have drinks with. But there’s some form of solidarity about belonging to the senior staff, about having to manage team expectations and oversee whole departments, and there’s enough familiarity between them that it’s not entirely awkward to sit with the others and share a few drinks.

Still, as the evening deepens, he’s not sorry to see the gathering is clearly winding down. Tygan is the first to point out the late hour, and Bradford moves to his feet with relief. He debates with himself for a few seconds, and then holds out his hand. “Come on,” he says to Kelly. “Let’s go.”

It’s the first time he’s treated her anything but professionally in view of others. Kelly doesn’t seem surprised by the shift, but her smile is warm. “All right,” she agrees, and she sets her glass down beside her on the sofa’s arm and puts her hand in his.

Bradford pulls her up to her feet, and doesn’t bother to release her hand once she’s standing. “Meeting in the morning?” he asks the Commander.

He shakes his head. “We’ll decide tomorrow,” he says, and gestures at Kelly. “Once she’s got the rest of the team picked out.”

Kelly slips her hand from his as they leave the Commander’s quarters, and Bradford is unoffended by her desire to keep public displays of affection out of the Avenger’s hallways. “Not that I dislike it,” she teases him as they move to the elevator together. “But I figure the crew has enough to gossip about right now.”

“Don’t worry,” he tells her dryly as they step into the elevator. “I won’t do anything ridiculous like kiss you goodbye in front of your whole squad.”

She winces, but she’s laughing. “You better not,” she mutters, though when the elevator doors shut, she’s swift to rock up onto her toes to press a kiss against his lips. “But if we come back successful from this one, I wouldn’t mind getting a reward.”

He laughs, and kisses her again before he steps away from her as the elevator doors open. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he murmurs, and he spends the rest of the evening doing his best to not think about how few nights he may have left with her.

The Commander was right: the next morning, as news as the upcoming mission spreads, a change comes across the Avenger. It’s been dubbed Operation Leviathan — “Gatecrasher was taken,” the Commander had complained, giving them a dark look, “otherwise that would have been perfect.” But the Avenger’s crew is now hushed and serious, and faces are somber as final preparations are started.

“There’s no reason to delay,” the Commander announces briefly at their short senior staff meeting that night. “We’ll go through the portal tomorrow. Menace?”

“At your service,” she says, with a little nod. “I have a team ready and willing to go with you.”

The Commander inhales, and turns. They aren’t sitting around the cramped circular table they use for most of their meetings: this is too important for the awkward fight to take turns getting into place. Instead, the four of them are standing in loose semi-circle in front of it, facing the Commander where he stands alone, and now he looks from Kelly to the man standing beside her. “Dr. Tygan?”

“The Avatar prototype is as perfect as we can make it,” the chief scientist says calmly. “And we have done everything possible to ensure your safety for the process.”

The Commander nods. “Dr. Shen?” he asks his chief engineer.

Shen stands, slender and strong, between Bradford and Tygan. “We’re in good shape,” she says, justifiable pride in her voice. “We’re set for the power draws needed, and we’ll be able to monitor you every step of the way.”

“Central?” the Commander asks quietly, his final check.

“Commander,” Bradford responds, and crosses his arms. “We’re ready.” He doesn’t say more than that, letting the simplicity of his answer stand for his certainty. 

The Commander nods. “Yes,” he says with an air of finality. “We are.” He takes a breath, and in one fluid motion, comes to a perfect salute despite the fact that his arm is bare hours out of a sling. But advanced medicine and sheer determination can work wonders: his dark fingers are steady, his arm straight, the salute crisp and military-perfect.

It’s a response Bradford hadn’t known was still ingrained in him: he finds himself moving almost automatically to return the honor, his boots tapping together and his spine straightening as his arm raises. He’s surprised to find that Kelly, at the other end of their semi-circle, does the same. Her salute is just as carefully precise as any drill instructor could have asked for, even though she’s never gone through boot camp. She clearly times her release of it to his, though, less certain with the ritual as the Commander lowers his own hand.

“It has been a privilege,” the Commander says quietly. “One that I hope will continue long beyond tomorrow’s mission. Dismissed.”

“Where’d you learn to salute?” Bradford asks Kelly as head back to their shared room.

She grimaces. “Ricky has been drilling me,” she admits. “We’ve got a thing planned, for the Commander, and I think he’s enjoying himself too much.”

It takes Bradford the better part of a minute to remember that Ricky is probably actually Marquez — he thinks the man’s given name is actually Enrique, and is only a little embarrassed to realize that despite knowing the man for more than twenty year’s he’s not entirely sure of that. “He’s a good Marine,” he says neutrally, though his lips twitch at the nickname.

“Was my salute awful?” Kelly worries, still not quite at home with the military trappings draped across the XCOM she joined years earlier as a operative for all that she now carries the rank of colonel.

He laughs despite himself. “It was fine,” he assures her, and then, because he’s curious, “So what’s this thing you’ve got planned for the Commander?”

It’s her turn to laugh. “Show up tomorrow,” she invites. “Find out.”

Tomorrow is several hours away, though, and he only has so much time left with her before she leaves on what might be her last mission. “Fine,” he says, and pulls her through the door of his quarters. “I can think of other things to do with you tonight, anyway.”

“Can you?” she teases, and he shuts the door behind her and they don’t talk about much of anything for the rest of the evening.

There isn’t anything left to say anyway, he thinks, as he wraps his body around hers some hours later and waits to sleep. They’ve already said everything that matters, and they won’t talk about the fears they both will carry into their morning duties. 

She kisses him in the morning before she leaves ahead of him. For all it might be the last time he’s alone with her, neither of them treat the moment with any greater weight than any other morning. They can’t, Bradford thinks, as she rocks back on her heels and gives him a little smile. If they focus too much on what they might lose, on what’s at stake, he’s not sure either of them will be able to get through the day.

So instead he just gives her a simple kiss, the kind he’s grown used to giving her in the mornings as they leave to attend to separate duties, and she smiles at him and rests her fingertips on his cheek but doesn’t say anything else. Kelly leaves first, to go to her squad, and he’s bare minutes behind her, to go to the bridge: two different sides of the same mission.

It’s strange to think of her gathering with the rest of the Avenger’s groundside troops a few hours later in the armory. It’s just one more part of her life he’s relatively uninvolved in: he sees her lead the troops on the ground, obviously, and he reads her reports and knows the overview of things, but he doesn’t know the little rituals and traditions she’s surely developed to keep her troops even and solid as they prepare for a mission. He knows how she leads — he’s worked with her on enough missions of his own that he knows her style and how she manages subordinates — but he’s never seen her in action in the armory itself, keeping tabs on her squadmates and preparing to deploy.

Thirty years ago, Bradford thinks, he’d have been one of the soldiers suiting up for the mission with her; ten years ago, and he might have been Kelly, standing at the head of the room and keeping an eye on the controlled chaos. But now he’s too old to be the best option for a groundside soldier, and too valuable to place away from the bridge of the Avenger where he can coordinate the attack from the central logistics hub of XCOM. He is Central, and because of that, he’s never gone down to the armory before a mission: his job is elsewhere, and that is Kelly’s realm.

Bradford rarely regrets it, but now, standing on the bridge and thinking of her, he tries to picture what’s going on in the armory and finds he can’t.

“Ready?” the Commander asks from his side.

Bradford turns to face the man he’s risked his life for too many times to count. “As we’ll ever be,” he says, putting thoughts of Kelly aside. He gestures at the elevator. “To the lab?”

He doesn’t entirely follow the technobabble Shen and Tygan exchange as they get the Commander back into his bulky stasis suit. The Commander seems to understand more of it, nodding or shaking his head as required, and in the end, Shen tosses the heavy helmet at Bradford and says, “Get this sorted out, will you?” as she turns to hook up a monitor.

Bradford turns the helmet in his hands, and lifts it up over his oldest friend’s face. “Once more into the breach,” he says.

“See you on the other side,” the Commander agrees, and Bradford fits the helmet down over his dark face and seals it into place.

It’s a bare twenty minutes before the Commander is moving again, this time rising from the gurney in the Avatar’s body: a slim, wiry form with ridiculous white hair and a purple face-mask. He moves quickly, a spring in his step, but there’s awkwardness inherent in every motion: a new body, Bradford marvels, whole and young and ready for war, but unfamiliar and untested.

“So,” he says, looking from the Commander’s real body where it lies quiescent in its stasis suit a few feet away and then back to the slender muscled form of the Avatar where the Commander’s consciousness now somehow psionicly resides. “Can you actually talk in that thing?”

The Commander’s glowing eyes flicker behind the face-mask. One of his hands comes up and makes an undeniably rude gesture.

“Great,” Bradford mutters. “Way to leave the speech-making to me, Commander.”

Shen laughs. “Everything looks good on our end, Commander,” she reports, and looks up from her screen. “Good luck.”

Bradford doesn’t stay to watch the Commander suit up or test out his psi-amp, or even to see what surprise Kelly and her troops have cooked up for him. Instead, as Maddie Kleiner slinks into the room to start guiding the Commander through what Tygan suspects are some fairly impressive natural psionics inherent to the Avatar form, Bradford just shakes his head.

“Give ’em hell,” he tells the Commander, and he gets a solid nod in response before he ducks out and makes his way back up to the bridge.

He’s Central, and his job is in command, not out on the field. He makes some pithy speech, short and to the point, and doesn’t think about what they’re risking or what the cost will be if they fail. Instead, he grips the railing of the bridge display and hauls in a breath. 

It’s strange to not send the ground team off on the Skyranger, to not hear Firebrand’s steady voice declaring that Kelly’s team is ready to deploy. It’s stranger still to order most of the remaining combat troops take up defensive positions around the Shadow Chamber where the psionic gate is open and active, on the off chance that the team fails and something alien emerges from the gate in their place. He’s not used to having so many people on the bridge, either: every officer in XCOM, he thinks, is at their station, doubling and tripling up to act as backups for each other regardless of what shift they’re usually assigned to. Off-duty scientists and engineers stand at the ready near unused consoles, waiting for a sign that they’ll be called up for some task or another; even the five men who have no other responsibility but to cook for the Avenger’s inhabitants are quietly clustered out of the way in a corner, unwilling to wait somewhere unknowing while the world’s fate is decided.

He could order all the extraneous personnel out of the way, Bradford thinks. It would clear room on the bridge and restore the military order XCOM has grown back into after all the years of hardscrabble survival. If something goes wrong, he won’t want to have extra bodies hanging around in the way.

But instead, Bradford just takes a tight breath. He’s on his own again, the way he was twenty-odd years ago when the Commander had first been captured. He has no superior officer at his side to offer advice and to check his orders. He glances around at all the faces — familiar and unknown — looking to him for answers, and can sympathize with their need to know, to be present for this one final push. These are his people, he recognizes, and the weight of their lives rests heavy on his shoulders.

One way or another, Bradford knows this is the last mission XCOM will field against ADVENT. If they fail, even if the Avenger survives whatever retaliation comes through the psionic gate, there won’t be another chance at this. And if they succeed… Well, whatever remains of the aliens afterward won’t be the same ADVENT he’s fought for twenty years. It’ll be a remnant, a crumbling edifice of alien control: one they’ll still fight, yes, and hopefully conquer, but it won’t be ADVENT. It’ll be simply the dying echoes of the new world being reclaimed by the old.

The railing is smooth beneath his hands, and he looks around the silent bridge. Dr. Shen died here, he recalls suddenly, six years or so earlier. Chou died here; Kenbridge and two of Shen’s engineers died here. Bradford can still pick out the spots where their bodies fell, though their blood’s long since been washed from the floor. He looks past the display at the doorway on the far side of it, and remembers Kelly darting to his side to kill a sectoid there, something he hasn’t thought of in years for all he’s walked through the doorway almost daily since then.

He blows out a breath. “All right, people,” he calls to the suddenly crowded bridge, and he straightens his spine as he looks up at the display. “Let’s make this one count.”


	26. Epilogue: Acquiring Optimism

# Acquisitions

## Epilogue

### Acquiring Optimism

They make it back.

Despite the odds, despite the sheer panic of the collapsing psionic network, despite interference from the Elders themselves, the Commander is able to hold the gate open just long enough for the entire squad to stumble through it back into the Shadow Chamber. Kelly’s mostly supporting her sniper’s weight as they retreat, and Kleiner is hauling Khatri bodily over his shoulder, but the whole squad makes it through the psionic gate before it falters shut a final time, and the Commander comes back to consciousness inside a bulky stasis suit even though he hadn’t been able to save the Avatar body.

But they all come back.

Bradford hadn’t really let himself think about any other outcome, for all that would have been a sensible precaution. Instead, he stands next to Shen in the lab — he’d bolted there for answers when it became clear something was going wrong — and lets himself breathe without fear for the first time in several hours, and finds that for the first time in decades, it feels like the world is firmly back on track. He’s fairly sure the past few hours have taken years off his lifespan, and he won’t be surprised if he wakes the next morning with even more grey hair than he’s got already, but they’re victorious and everyone has come back. 

The Commander struggles to sit up, and Bradford steps forward to lend him an arm to use as leverage.

“Back to being a puny old man,” the Commander groans, and he clearly has trouble moving himself in the heavy stasis suit. “Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.”

Shen comes around to the Commander’s other side, and together Bradford and Shen are able to help him down off the table and onto his own feet. It takes ten minutes to unhook the suit and peel it off the Commander’s rather wizened frame, but once it’s nothing more than an empty shell on the floor, the Commander steps free of it and stretches.

“It’s good to be home, Central,” he says, looking around himself. “Thanks for holding her together until we got back.”

“Thanks for getting everyone home,” Bradford responds, more honestly than intended.

The Commander’s smile is satisfied and amused. “I did promise,” he reminds Bradford, and looks past him to where Shen and Tygan are conferring in low voices at Tygan’s console. “What’s the verdict?”

“Well,” Tygan begins rather doubtfully, “it will take some time to ascertain the full ramifications of the destruction of the Elders’ facility, but —”

“You kicked their asses, Commander,” Shen interrupts, sounding very satisfied, and she doesn’t look back at Tygan as he gives her a faintly annoyed look and rolls his eyes. “Whatever you did blew up whatever they had, and it’s going to take them a long time to recover from this one.”

“If they recover at all,” Tygan agrees, and though he glances at Shen rather repressively, he doesn’t sound upset. “I concur.”

“Good,” the Commander says, and takes a deep breath. “I like the sound of that.”

There’s a low undercurrent to his voice that Bradford doesn’t like. He gives his friend a sharp glance, but the Commander just shakes his head. “What’s ADVENT’s official position on what just happened?” he asks instead.

Bradford’s smile is tight and satisfied. “They don’t have one,” he reveals. “They’re too busy putting out fires that transmission hack set off. Seven different city centers have rioted and three more have actually declared independence from ADVENT.”

“Oh, I _really_ like the sound of that,” the Commander says again with a chuckle. He looks around the room. “I’d say we can call this one a victory.”

Bradford gestures to the loud-hailer unit hooked onto the wall. “You made me do the first speech,” he says dryly. “I’ll leave this one to you.”

The Commander tilts his head, and his brown eyes go distant. After a moment, he runs one thin hand over his balding skull, and nods. He strides for the radio until still only in his socks, snaps it down from the wall with a decisive motion, and turns it on without hesitation. “All stations and units,” he says, and doesn’t wince even as his voice echos, amplified from every speaker on board the Avenger. “All stations and units,” he repeats again, and waits just half a breath to give people the chance to quiet down before he broadcasts his official message.

“Well done, XCOM,” he says simply. “I’m calling an all-hands meeting in twenty minutes in the hangar bay. Mandatory attendance.” He snaps the radio back to the wall, and then turns around. “Where did my boots wind up?” he asks.

“An all-hands meeting?” Bradford asks neutrally.

“I have a plan,” the Commander says, and refuses to elaborate. Bradford looks past him to Shen, who shrugs, and then to Tygan, who looks equally mystified. They share a brief, wordless consult, and then Bradford looks back at the Commander.

“Okay,” he says mildly, and points out the older man’s boots where they were left when he’d climbed into the stasis suit some hours earlier.

It means that the three of them trail behind the Commander on their way to the hangar bay, just as in the dark about what to expect as the others awaiting their arrival there. 

All of XCOM is clearly gathering, and it is not a quiet event. Even if the Commander has yet to formally declare the mission a victory, it’s hardly a secret that it’s been successful: crew members stand loose and casual in happy little clusters, and people sport easy smiles and wide grins and there’s laughter sprinkling through the hangar bay from half a dozen directions.

They get a very unofficial and obviously unrehearsed cheer on their arrival, but the Commander is quick to wave it off, to indicate that it’s not time for him to take center stage yet. He moves in a beeline toward the Skyranger’s nose, and Bradford exchanges one last questioning glance with Shen and Tygan before they too split up to check on their separate personnel. Then, a second smaller burst of applause directs his attention back to the doorway, where Kelly and her squad are arriving from the armory.

They’re a bit worse for the wear — two of them are limping, and have the dazed look of soldiers on too much pain medicine to fully focus on themselves — but they’re out of their armor and returning, hale and hearty, to a hero’s welcome. Kelly ducks her head, grinning, and sidesteps out of the spotlight as the applause dims, and her five other squadmates step forward to greet comrades and friends.

Marquez is closer and so gets to Kelly before Bradford does, and the big battered man swoops her up for a very enthusiastic hug that involves actually lifting her bodily up from the ground. Bradford struggles not to grin as Kelly responds rather indignantly to being so manhandled. But she’s looking up at Marquez fondly, and Bradford knows the exact tone of voice she’s probably using with the ex-Marine because he’s been on the receiving end of it frequently himself.

Marquez, though, is unabashed. “Don’t care,” he’s saying as Bradford steps up closer. “Welcome back. You did good.”

“Thanks, Ricky,” Kelly tells him, affectionate and tolerant, and then she notices Bradford. “Central,” she greets him, her eyes bright and happy.

“Excuse me,” Bradford says to Marquez. 

Surprising even himself, he tugs Kelly away from her friend to pull her close and kiss her long and hard.

He can hear laughter rising from around them, but he doesn’t really care. Kelly’s smiling against his mouth, her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt along his chest, and she’s back and safe and breathing in his arms, which is all that matters.

“Welcome home,” he tells her when he lifts his head.

She sinks back down from her toes to stand flat-footed in front of him, her hands still holding his shirt. “Yeah,” she says, smiling up at him. “It’s good to be home.”

“Well,” Marquez says mildly, a grin spreading across his face. “There were bets about whether you’d do that or not, you know.”

“I don’t want to know,” Bradford says, and figuring he’s already broken his personal rule about not touching Kelly in public, he tugs her to his side so they can stand together with his arm resting across her shoulders. People are already going to talk, he assumes, excusing his desire to keep touching her. And they’ve won what’s probably the decisive victory in this war; he figures he’s allowed a bit of PDA.

Kelly’s smaller arm snakes behind him to hug around his waist, and she leans against him, warm and soft, so he assumes she doesn’t mind the public display of affection either.

The Commander gives a speech, because of course he does. It’s not a bad one, as speeches go: it’s short and heartfelt and ends in an open invitation for most of the Avenger’s crew to spend what little remains of the evening in the bar. Victory speeches, at least, are happy occasions, full of congratulations and thanks for the sacrifices made along the way. It’s been a very long time since Bradford’s been on the receiving end of one. He finds he likes the feeling, and so he pays a bit more attention to the Commander’s words than he might have otherwise. 

At the very end of things, though, the Commander lowers his voice away from the ringing rhetoric that marked the rest of the speech. Instead, simply and honestly, he finishes by saying, “Congratulations, XCOM. And well done. I’m proud of you.”

Standing beside Marquez, Bradford hears the man’s quick inhale, and expects the shout that follows. “Vigilo confido!” Marquez barks, and it electrifies the room. 

Soldiers, young and and old, shift to attention: Bradford pulls his arm from Kelly and she steps away from him so that they can both salute. Engineers stand straight and proud, and scientists square their shoulders. The bridge officers center themselves on their feet and raise their chins.

The response, when it comes, erupts from every person present, from the technicians who work in the labs to the cooks who prepare their meals.

“Vigilo confido!” roars through the hangar, and in the echoing aftermath, the fierce pride dissolves into loud, raucous cheering as the Commander steps down.

Bradford looks at Marquez, who crosses his arms and looks very satisfied with what he started. “I always did want to be a drill instructor,” he admits when Bradford catches his eye. “Never did get officially tagged for that assignment before the world ended.”

Bradford shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “What do you think you’ve been doing for the past five years?” he asks, gesturing around them. 

Marquez’s smile spreads. “Yeah,” he says fondly, looking at the recruits he’s trained. He switches his gaze to Kelly. “Suppose some of them have turned out all right.”

“Thanks, Ricky,” she says dryly, rolling her eyes. “High praise.”

“Hey,” he protests mildly, though his eyes are dancing. “I remember how awful you were when Central first hauled you into XCOM.” And, when she just laughs, Marquez turns back to Bradford. “First time she ever shot something, not only did she miss her target, the recoil put her flat back on her ass in the dirt.”

Bradford looks to Kelly with a lift of his eyebrows. “She was that bad and you didn’t tell me?” he asks. 

“Thanks for that,” Kelly says to Marquez with a laugh. “Really.”

“She was a fast learner,” Marquez teases, and reaches out to clap a hand to her shoulder. She doesn’t flinch under the weight. “I’ll see you at the bar, Menace. Central,” he adds, with a more professional nod, and then he releases Kelly’s shoulder and turns away.

Bradford looks down at Kelly and finds her scanning the room. “What’s left to do?” he asks her.

Her forehead creases as she does her best to pick her squad out of the crowd. “I need to haul Bowers and Khatri into medical,” she says, and he has the sense she’s formulating her mental checklist as she speaks. “And I should probably convince Maddie to get checked out too, but she won’t want to go. I need to write the after-action report up, and I should really double-check the armory and gear and set up some repair time with some of Shen’s folks.”

The price of leadership, Bradford acknowledges, thinking of his own task list waiting for him up on the bridge, usually means that even celebration has to wait until duty is done.

“Two hours?” he hazards.

Her sigh is very faint. “Better make it three,” she decides, and then she tilts her head, her brown eyes sparkling as she glances up at him. “Meet you at the bar?”

He considers his options, then scoffs. “Not on your life,” he tells her, because he has no plans to share her with the rest of XCOM. He doesn’t kiss her again — once in public is probably enough for both of them — but he does touch her face briefly, where her freckles spill across her cheekbones. “Our room. As soon as you’re done.”

Kelly’s smile is slow and sweet. “I look forward to it,” she murmurs, and with that promise shared between them, they both go off to attend to what needs to be done.

The bridge is quiet in the aftermath. There’s a skeleton crew left standing — techs and officers willing to stay behind while their comrades celebrate — and Bradford appreciates that they’re focused enough to start coordinating all the sudden communications they’re receiving from resistance cells and XCOM sympathizers who hadn’t existed forty-eight hours previously. Still, though no one drops any bit of professionalism as they work through the data, it feels less formal to work with such a small team. That’s not helped by the Commander arriving roughly two hours after they start working with a tray filled with various drinks.

“Just don’t get drunk,” Bradford orders his team, but he gestures at the tray all the same. “Or if you do, bow out before you do something stupid.”

“Define stupid,” one of his younger officers requests, her mouth twitching in a poorly-hidden attempt to repress a smile.

He gives her a mild glare, entertained despite himself. “If you need it spelled out, Mikkelsen, maybe I should take you off the comms.”

“Right,” she agrees, unoffended, and takes what looks like a tequila shot off the tray with a broad grin. “Duly noted.”

The Commander passes Bradford a glass that contains what is unmistakably whiskey. The good stuff, too, Bradford realizes after his first sip, and lifts the glass in silent thanks. “So,” the Commander says, settling himself down next to Bradford’s station. “Report.”

Bradford has never given a status report while actually drinking before, though he’s ashamed to admit he’s probably done a few drunk over the past twenty years. He turns that thought aside. “We’re in better shape than I expected,” he starts, and he walks the Commander through everything he’s missed in the past seven hours.

It takes some time. Most of the remaining bridge officers take their leave as the clock display clicks over to the start of night shift; there are one or two people who come to replace them, but the bridge’s lights dim and Bradford knows it will be a quiet watch for the volunteers coming on duty.

The Commander leans back in his chair at the end of things. “Better news than I expected,” he admits. “Well done, Central. I’m afraid I don’t have as optimistic a report for you.”

And then he tells Bradford about the lasts words the Elders said to him as he fought to buy time for the team to return home.

Part of Bradford wants to laugh in despair: winning the war once wasn’t enough, so now they need to look back up at the stars and wonder what else is out there that frightened the Elders and drove them to such desperate measures? Part of him wants to rail at the universe, to buckle under the weight of yet another challenge, to just walk away from the effort and worry it will surely take to build XCOM up again into something capable of rising to meet this new threat.

But another part of Bradford thinks of the thousands of people who have spent the last twenty-four hours rebelling against alien control, who have stood up to retake their world on the strength of little more than their sense of justice or outrage and a few disturbing truths. He remembers the people XCOM has already recruited and the victories they’ve managed to win as simply an underground resistance organization, and he wonders what XCOM can do if it brings the might of a united and focused world to bear against this unknown enemy.

His mind flashes quickly to his very vague plans for retirement, of the half-formed hazy idea he’d been toying with of someday being able to give up active duty. He’d wondered, if he managed to live long enough to see the world reclaimed, if he’d want to leave XCOM in the aftermath, to enjoy the world he’d helped save. Now that doing so would mean abandoning XCOM to face a new threat without him, he finds he isn’t as attached to the idea of stepping away as he thought.

Retirement, he concedes grudgingly, wouldn’t have been awful. But he’s XCOM’s Central Officer, and there’s still work to be done. He won’t back away from that challenge, and in some ways, he almost looks forward to it: to building XCOM back up, to making them into the defense the Earth needs in this newer, more threatening world. 

Kelly, at least, will understand that, and in some ways, she’s now Menace as much as he is Central: she won’t be willing to sit on the sidelines either. He values her need to fight for her home as much as he values her laughter or how she looks at him. She understands his almost pathological devotion to XCOM, and in some ways, she shares it. He thinks of how she’ll react to this news, and almost smiles. She’ll stay with him, he realizes with sudden fierce love for her, because she won’t want to leave him and she won’t want to leave XCOM. The fact that he finds both reasons reassuring only reinforces how very much he values her presence, solid and fierce, at his side. 

Still, faced suddenly with a very different future than what he expected, Bradford blows out a breath as he considers it. “At least we have some warning,” he says at last, and he watches the Commander’s face lose some of its tightness. “And we’ve got some time to prepare, even if we don’t know how long we’ve got or what’s coming. You’re basically the only real human authority left on Earth right now — we won’t have trouble getting people behind this, not if you make it a priority once ADVENT’s gone.”

“True,” the Commander says. He tilts his head. “Could be a long road, Central. Another twenty years, maybe.”

In twenty years, he’ll be well past seventy; the Commander will be on the wrong side of eighty. Bradford snorts. “Better get started training up my replacement, then. Twenty years ought to give him a good head start.”

“I’d tell you to get Menace up to speed, but she’s not that much younger than you are,” the Commander agrees. “Ursus, maybe. He’s young enough.” He shakes his head. “We’ll be the old guard for the next war, Central. Well,” he amends, looking down at the empty glass he’s been rolling between his palms. “The even older guard. We’ve hardly been the young ones this round.”

Because that’s truer than Bradford wants to admit, he stretches his shoulders uncomfortably. “Still,” he counters. “We did pretty well, for a couple of old guys.”

“We did, didn’t we?” And the Commander sounds amused. “Save the day, kill the aliens, retake the Earth.” He lifts his empty glass in a mock toast. “Hell, you even got the girl.”

Bradford can’t help but bark out a laugh. “Yeah,” he says, and then eyes the Commander speculatively. “About that, actually. I have a favor to ask.”

He’s in a remarkably good mood when he reaches his quarters roughly twenty minutes later, and his mood only improves further when he finds Kelly sprawled on her back across their small bed. She’s obviously recently arrived — her boots are still on, and he’s learned that she vastly prefers to take them off the instant she can, so the fact that she hasn’t yet bothered to remove them means he’s caught her shortly after she’s come off-duty.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he says affectionately, and only when she lifts her head and opens her eyes to smile at him does he realize he’s slipped up and actually used an endearment aloud with her. He winces. “Sorry.”

Her laugh is low and satisfied. “Why should you be sorry?” she asks, stretching out in a way that gives him ideas. “I like being your sweetheart.”

Bradford steps away from the door. “I used to call you that undercover,” he reminds her. “I don’t want you to think it’s just leftover from that.”

She laughs again. “John,” Kelly says, and it’s still a thrill to hear her call him by name. “I wanted you the whole time we were undercover together. You think I mind a reminder of that?”

He crosses the room swiftly to lean over her and kiss her, and she wraps her arms around him and pulls him down with her onto the bed before the kiss is broken. He laughs, perfectly willing to be directed over her. “And what are you going to do with me,” he asks her, “now that you’ve got me?”

She hums, trailing her fingers up his back. “Oh,” she drawls out. “I can think of a few things.” 

As far as celebrating saving the world goes, Bradford thinks as he bends to kiss her, having Kelly beneath him in his bed is about as good as it gets. He’d far rather be here with her than out in the Avenger’s bar with the rest of XCOM. “Yeah,” he agrees when he pauses to catch his breath, his hands already working at her shirt. “I owe you a reward, if I remember right.”

Kelly’s laugh is low and expectant. “Yes,” she says, eyes sparkling up at him. “Please.”

He kisses her again, and then they’re both too focused on each other for more conversation.

It’s not until afterward, until his heart rate has slowed and she’s starting to shiver against the constant cold of the Avenger’s nighttime temperatures, does she speak again. “Lily mentioned something about finding us better quarters,” she murmurs, nuzzling her head against his shoulder as he tugs the blankets up over their entwined bodies. “Something with a bigger bed.”

He blows out a laugh despite himself. “I won’t complain,” he admits. “I’m too old for sneaking a girl into my bed, and this feels an awful lot like being back in college.” He wraps an arm around her and she cuddles close. 

He can feel her shake with laughter against his side. “I never went off to university,” she tells him, which surprises him. “But you’re right, it does feel a bit like being a teenager again.”

“I always figured you were in college when the aliens hit,” Bradford says. He frowns, doing the math. “You’d have been, what, twenty-one?”

“Yeah,” she confirms. And she lifts up her head. “Don’t laugh,” she warns him. “I was a dancer.”

“A dancer?” he repeats, trying to picture it.

Kelly smiles. “Ballet,” she says, and her fingers skip across his chest, a graceful sweep something like dancing legs. “I joined a local company when I was sixteen, and moved into Dublin to join a bigger company once I was done with secondary school. It was my life.” She sounds more practical then wistful. “I never went back to it, after those first Unification Day bombings and the riots.”

“It explains how you move,” Bradford decides after a moment, putting this new information together with what he’s seen from her during the past six years. “I wondered about that, actually. Most people don’t have that sort of self-awareness of their limits.”

Her laugh is quiet, not quite amused but not regretful either. “You’d be surprised how well ballet prepared me for fighting aliens,” she admits. “I was in really good shape, back then, and used to doing a lot of exercise with relatively few breaks. It meant I could keep going a lot longer than some of the other resistance folks I fell in with. And I’m small,” she adds with a shrug. “I need less calories than a bigger athlete does to keep going, and I’m able to slip into places and hiding spaces the larger men in my groups couldn’t manage. So I became very useful, very quickly, and Dr. Vahlen picked me up a year or so after that first Unification Day.”

Bradford hasn’t seen Vahlen in more than a decade, and has no idea if the other woman is even alive anymore. “And she eventually sent you out to us,” he recalls. He looks down at where she lies curled up against him, and remembers the first time he met her. It would have been six years ago now, he thinks, out in the rain outside some crappy bar on Unification Day. A grin tugs at his lips despite himself. “I should have known we’d end up like this,” he teases her, and when her eyes reflect curiosity, he reminds her, “Didn’t I manage to bring you home from a bar with me the very first night we met?”

Kelly rolls her eyes, and shifts away from him, pushing herself up to slide off the bed in search of her pajamas. “True enough,” she allows wryly. And, as she picks up a shirt from the floor to slip it on over her head, she gives him an appreciative glance. “I suppose it’s ended well enough for both of us.”

He stretches out on the bed, enjoying the view as she gets dressed. “No complaints,” he agrees, and waits until she’s clothed and moving back to the bed before he rolls over to come to his feet.

It’s easier, they’ve discovered, if only one of them is moving around at a time: his quarters are small for one person, and definitely not designed for two. Kelly rearranges the blankets on the bed as he dresses for sleep and sets the small space to rights for the night, and when everything is stowed away and clean, they take the time to sort themselves out as comfortably as possible on the bed before turning out the light.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Kelly says as the small room plunges into darkness. “I’d rather be with you than out in the barracks, but you have to admit…” And she stretches her toes out and inches closer to him. “More space would be nice.”

“I’m not disagreeing,” he says, and after a long moment where she sighs against his skin and settles comfortably beside him, he speaks again, before she has the chance to start turning her mind toward sleep. “So I had a talk with the Commander an hour or two ago.”

“Yeah?” Kelly asks. “Anything important?”

Bradford considers.

He should tell her that the Elders fled something that had them running scared, that XCOM’s job will soon include preparing to defend Earth from an unknown enemy: one that could be coming for them at any moment, one that frightened all the might of the powerful aliens that nearly conquered Earth. He should explain to her where he thinks his place will be for the next decades, on the Avenger’s bridge and in whatever headquarters XCOM winds up creating, and how he knows that she’ll likely be assigned beside him before too long. She probably doesn’t have many more years as a groundside squad leader left in her — she’s past forty, and even though she still moves as easily as ever, her age and the injuries inflicted on her small body will eventually start to catch up with her. Combat is a job for the young, and she’s already one of the oldest groundside troops still active; she knows as well as anyone that her days on the ground are limited.

Bradford should tell her that he suspects the Commander will start to move her out of daily groundside operations and onto the bridge now that they’ve pushed their way to a decisive victory. The Commander, he thinks, will start teaching her how to coordinate troops by drone footage and radio. Bradford’s willing to bet that within five years, Kelly will find herself moved permanently into the role he’s been handling for almost the entirety of his own XCOM career, a logistics officer keeping tabs on XCOM as a whole rather than merely the groundside troops. The Commander has said as much; Bradford doesn’t think Kelly will dislike the change, and expects she’ll move into that new position as adeptly as she handled the change from operative to soldier six years prior.

But all of that will come to light soon enough, he figures. So instead of telling her his assumptions, instead of sharing the news the Commander will likely bring to the briefing table in the morning to go over with the senior staff, Bradford just takes a deep breath and focuses on something far more vital.

“Yeah,” he says. “Actually.” And he wraps his arms around her tighter. “So the Commander is basically the only human authority left these days,” he tells her. He’s glad it’s dark, because now that the moment has come, he finds that he’s not as sure of things as he’d been only a few hours earlier, and she’s observant enough that she’d notice his uncertainty if the lights were on. “And there’s this old tradition, I guess, about how the captain of a ship can stand in as a legal authority for some stuff, and the Avenger’s definitely his ship. So I was thinking — it’s not the old world, Kelly, not really, but it’s not ADVENT’s world anymore either.” He swallows, and bends his head down so that his lips rest in her hair. He shuts his eyes. “I asked him. He’ll marry us tomorrow, if you’ll still have me.”

Kelly laughs, and it’s the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard, because she sounds delighted, pleased and surprised by his offer, and it sets his heart at ease even before she speaks. “Yeah,” she says, and he opens his eyes in relief. She squirms against him until she can lean up to kiss him, sweet and certain. “I’d like that.”

“Me too,” he admits, and he gathers her close and runs a hand through her loose hair. “I mean, it doesn’t really matter in the long run, whether it’s official or not, but — I’d like to.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, and settles close against him. “We can have this much, at least.” Kelly rests her head where it fits so perfectly on his shoulder, resting lightly against the side of his neck, and he can hear her sigh in the darkness even as he feels her lips curve against his throat. “It’s more than I’d have ever asked for, twenty years ago.”

Bradford can’t argue with that. He knows the feeling, all too well. His whole life right now is more than he ever expected he’d get, really, twenty-one years ago when XCOM went down in flames. He’d assumed then that he’d follow XCOM into ashes and obscurity, that his life would be spent in a brief hopeless struggle against overwhelming odds until the aliens and ADVENT managed to crush the last flickers of resistance from the world. He figured he’d die somewhere, alone and unmourned and forgotten, and most days he’d only hoped that his death wouldn’t be meaningless, that he’d be able to give his life making some small difference in the fight against ADVENT.

Twenty years ago — hell, he recognizes, ten years ago, even five years ago — he’d never have dared even hope for the future he’s now facing. XCOM reborn, with the Commander again at the helm; XCOM victorious, with the aliens overthrown and in panicked retreat; XCOM acknowledged and respected, stepping forward to lead Earth as it reclaims itself from ADVENT. Everything XCOM has become now is more than he ever really expected it would achieve. Twenty-one years ago, the victory they’ve now claimed for Earth had been more of a wild hope than any kind of feasible goal: a sort of lofty ideal he never really expected to see, a best-case scenario that existed only in theoretical imaginings and drunken regret for what could never be.

And even in those impossibly optimistic dreams, Bradford admits, he’d never really considered anything more personal than the duty he’d refused to abandon. His life was XCOM, simply and completely, because it had to be: there was nothing else left for him in a world ruled by ADVENT except the resistance organization that gave him purpose and direction. He’d sharpened himself into being simply Central, and hadn’t let himself think about being anything but what XCOM needed.

He had never dared imagine anyone like Kelly, even in vague nebulous hopes. It had been so far from his mind that it had never even occurred to him to wish for someone like her, brave and determined and solid and willing to stand and fight at his side.

Amused at that realization, Bradford drags his fingers up and down her back as he considers her. She’s not what he would have imagined for himself anyway, he concedes after a moment’s thought. At least, not back then, before he’d met her. He’d have dreamed of someone different, maybe, if twenty years ago he’d allowed himself to be more John Bradford and less Central. He’d have wanted someone more used to military structure and tactics, someone less prone to working so independently. Maybe he’d have pictured her like the women he’d used to date before XCOM: maybe he’d have imagined a tall blonde with pretty green eyes, like the last woman he’d semi-seriously pursued. He doubts he’d have imagined her being so much younger than him; he certainly wouldn’t have pictured her as some petite Irish ex-ballerina with a spread of dark freckles across her cheeks.

But he’d have wanted someone with her fire and her practicality, he thinks, tangling his fingers in her hair. He’d have imagined a woman unafraid of him, someone who could see through his role as Central to find John underneath. He’d have needed someone who would understand his devotion to XCOM, someone willing to stand up beside him and fight for the same cause. He’d have wanted a woman to make him laugh and to argue with him, to offer him support when he needed it and to reach for him with the same need he had for her.

But even then, Bradford acknowledges, twenty years ago and more, he’d never really thought about what he wanted for himself. It had always been about XCOM, and his duty as Central; he’d been too focused on defeating ADVENT to think past his responsibilities to consider his own personal wants. Kelly, he realizes, is the first time he’d had hopes as John and not as Central for the better part of two decades. 

Now he’s facing a future where everything he might have ever dared dream is within reach: where for once, he can look at what’s yet to come with eagerness rather than fear or worry.

“You’ve turned me into an optimist,” Bradford mutters accusingly against Kelly’s hair, keenly aware that for twenty years he’s had very little to look forward to.

Kelly just laughs, and lifts herself up so she can press her smile against his lips. “Is that so bad?” she wonders as she settles back down alongside him in the dark.

Bradford considers his future —XCOM’s task in retaking the world and protecting it from what might yet destroy it, Kelly devoted and solid at his side — and finds himself smiling.

“No,” he says, wrapping his arms around her. “I guess not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for coming along for the ride, folks. I had a lot of fun with this and am 95% really satisfied with it - it was entirely a guilty pleasure to write it, so I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I did.
> 
> Now that I've finished it, I'm off to (finally) play the Legacy Pack to see how badly all of this will be jossed! I may someday revisit this - I have some half-formed ideas for how to bring in some of the pre-existing DLCs (especially Alien Hunters and War of the Chosen), and I have sort of half-planned out Kelly's version of things. So there might be more to this later, in a different fic to stand alongside this one, but no promises.
> 
> Thank you for your comments and support. This is a small fandom and a random pairing, and it means a lot to me that you took the chance to try reading it.


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